X-Nico

unusual facts about Chinese porcelain



Plymouth porcelain

William Cookworthy, a Quaker Pharmacist of Plymouth, was greatly interested in locating in Cornwall and Devon minerals similar to those described by Père François Xavier d'Entrecolles, a Jesuit missionary who worked in China during the early eighteenth century, as forming the basis of Chinese porcelain.

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

In the painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, there is a large Chinese porcelain bowl in the foreground (standing on a Turkish carpet), and Brook uses this to introduce the subject of trade with China.


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Chinese porcelain in European painting

In Italy, the first known depiction of Chinese porcelain bowls is from the The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini (1514).

Covered jar with carp design

While underglaze blue designs and overglaze enamel paintings began to appear on Chinese porcelain in the fifteenth century, during the sixteenth they became markedly bolder and more exuberant in design and color.