Medium sized blue and white
wine ewer decorated by stylised
floral and vegetal motifs and
paneled designs enclosing figures.
The artefact reflects
metalwork originals and such
ceramic items where especially
created for the Islamic market.
"Blue and white pottery" covers a
wide range of white pottery and
porcelain decorated under the
glaze with a blue pigment,
generally cobalt oxide. The
decoration is commonly applied by
hand thgough brush painting but
also by stencilling or by transfer-
printing. Stencilling is a technique
which produces a pattern by
applying pigment to a surface
over an intermediate object with
designed gaps in it which permit
to the pattern to be created by
allowing the pigment to reach only
some parts of the surface. Blue
and white decoration first became
widely used in Chinese porcelain
in the 14th century, after the
cobalt pigment for the blue began
to be imported from Persia.
However, the origin of this
decorative style is thought to have
initially started in Iraq, when
craftsmen in Basra sought to
imitate imported white Chinese
stoneware with their own tin-
glazed, white pottery and added
decorative motifs in blue glazes.
Such Abbasid-period "blue and
white" pieces of ceramics date to
the 9th century A.D., decades
after the opening of a direct sea
route from Iraq to China. Later a
style of decoration based on
sinuous vegetal and floral forms
spreading across the object was
perfected and became extremely
popular. Examples of such
decorated porcelain were widely
exported, and inspired imitative
wares in Islamic ceramics and
later European tin- glazed
earthenware such as Delftware
and after the techniques were
discovered in the 18th century,
European porcelain. The true
development of blue and white
ware in China started with the
first half of the 14th century,
when it progressively replaced the
century-long tradition of bluish-
white ware, or Qingbai. The main
production center was in
Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province. With
the advent of the Ming dynasty in
1368, blue and white ware was
shunned for a time by the Court,
as being too foreign in inspiration.
Blue and white porcelain however
came back to prominence with the
Xuande Emperor, and again
developed from that time on.
During the 16th century a number
of blue and white wares were
characterized by Islamic
influences, which sometimes bore
Persian and Arabic script, due to
the influence of Muslim eunuchs
serving at his court.
- (CB.3278)
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