Late Ming

acknowledgements Exhibition The National museum of history and art Luxembourg (MNHA) is first and foremost grateful to the lenders of this exhibition, Sir Michael Butler himself and the owners of the Butler Family Collection.

Exhibition management Sir Michael Butler, Jean-Luc Mousset, Caromy Hoare, Ulrike Degen Design a|part, Gisèle Biache Wall notices

Authors Sir Michael Butler, Jean-Luc Mousset, Ulrike Degen

Translation from the English Romina Calò, Jean-Luc Mousset Proof reading Edmond Thill Restorer Rainer Fischer Transport and insurance Claude Lanners, Josyane Dicken Installation Gisèle Biache, Jean-Marie Elsen, Romain Graas, Daniel Hensel, Pit Kaiser, Fränz Kruse, Claude Lanners, Tom Lucas, Georges Roedel, Marc Scolati

Pedagogical service Edmond Thill, Tania Weiss Press and publics relations Edmond Thill, Tania Weiss, Gisèle Biache, Binsfeld communication company

The MNHA thanks all collaborators for their involvement in this exhibition!

Catalogue Author Sir Michael Butler Text editor Caromy Hoare Publisher Musée national d’histoire et d’art Luxembourg (MNHA) Coordinators Jean-Luc Mousset, Ulrike Degen Proof reading Maité Schenten Photography Tom Lucas Design a|part Impression Imprimerie Centrale

The MNHA is deeply indebted to all having contributed to this result.

© Musée national d’histoire et d’art Luxembourg, all rights reserved

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SUMMARY

Foreword Octavie Modert

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THE MNHA WELCOMES A “GREAT COLLECTOR OF OUR TIME” Jean-Luc Mousset

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Preface Sir Michael Butler

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THANKs for the contribution of DR NI YIBIN Sir Michael Butler

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I 1

Introduction Late Ming Porcelain from the Butler Collections Sir Michael Butler

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II

Catalogue Sir Michael Butler

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1 wanli (1573 – 1620) / Tianqi (1621 – 1627) 1.1 Blue-and-white (nos 1 – 23) 1.2 Export ware Kraak (Nos 24 – 29)

25 27 51

2 2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2

Tianqi (1621 – 1627) / Chongzhen (1628 – 1644) Ko-sometsuke and Ko-akae Export ware Ko-sometsuke: blue-and-white (Nos 30 – 35) Export ware Ko-akae: painted in enamels (Nos 36 – 44)

59 61 62 68

3 3.1 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3 3.2 3.3

Chongzhen (1628 – 1644) Blue-and-white, coloured pieces and monochromes Blue-and-white (Nos 45 – 48) Painted in enamels (Nos 49 – 53) MONOCHROMES (Nos 54 – 57) Hatcher Wreck (Nos 58 – 69) High Transitional (Nos 70 – 100)

77 79 80 84 89 93 106

SELECT Bibliography

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The MNHA welcomes a ''Great Collector of Our Time'' Five years ago, the Musée national d’histoire et d’art Luxembourg held an exhibition entitled, “Hybrids: Chinese porcelain with European territorial armorial bearings”.

It came about after the purchase of a series of plates emblazoned with the Luxembourg coat of arms and it helped to solve the mystery about the selection of the reproduced blazons. It was established that the armorial bearings were mainly those of the former Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands and to a lesser extent those of cities and kingdoms throughout Europe.

Today the MNHA is once again proud to contribute – even if in an indirect way – into the research on Chinese porcelain.

Thanks to a generous loan from Sir Michael Butler and his family, the museum is in a position to display – for the first time ever – an exhibition of Chinese porcelain exclusively produced from non-Imperial kilns of the late Ming period (1600-1644). It is Sir Michael Butler who conceived this event that gathers a hundred objects of which more than half have never before been shown in public.

Sir Michael Butler has published many specialized works on the Ming and Qing porcelain. He is also the author of the present catalogue that can now be viewed as a seminal book of reference on the subject of Chinese porcelain. To read it is to realize how large and important an admirer of porcelain Sir Michael Butler is.

Our collaboration with Sir Michael Butler in the conception of this exhibition and its catalogue has proved to be both invaluable and enriching. Aside from his great knowledge, his kindness and courtesy have served to inspire.

The MNHA feels therefore indebted to Sir Michael Butler, his family and Caromy Hoare. May they rest assured of our deep and sincere gratitude.

Jean-Luc Mousset Curator MNHA

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In the reign of the late Emperors of the Ming dynasty, the Imperial workshops were gradually abandoned with the most talented potters and painters moving into the private sector.

Unrecognized for a long time, this production can now be most fully appreciated thanks to the large collection amassed

by Sir Michael Butler over a period of almost fifty years.

In 2005, the Shanghai Museum, one of the biggest museums of Chinese porcelain in the world, displayed pieces from the Butler collection together with its own collected works. This exhibition was also held in London at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Sir Michael Butler has recently been acknowledged as one of the “Great Collectors of Our Time” in a book by James Stourton, President of Sotheby’s Europe.

PREFACE I was fortunate in that I bought my first house in London in 1958 at a time when all over Europe, but especially in the Netherlands and England, people were feeling the need to raise a little money by selling these beautiful things which had been in their houses for a long time but had never been very highly regarded. 17th century Chinese porcelain was on the market in large quantities.

I had a lot of shelves and no objects. My first purchase at Sotheby’s of “six pieces of old Chinese porcelain” was a success. One of the six appears to be unique. So I went on. Until about 1980 I bought late Ming purely because the objects seemed to me to be beautiful, especially the High Transitional seen in the last section of this exhibition. The organisers of the first ever exhibition dealing with 17th century Chinese porcelain, which took place in Hong Kong in 1981, came to me to borrow “one or two pieces” and to my surprise and, I think theirs, found that they wanted to borrow 25 or 30. I had become a collector.

I spent the next two decades trying within my means to acquire rare pieces, especially those with dates, interesting inscriptions or seal marks, or narrative scenes. I had exhibitions in the Netherlands in 1986 (going on to the Musées Royaux in Brussels and the National Museum of Wales); in twelve museums in the USA in 1990 – 1992; in the Musée Baur in Geneva in 1994; with Julia Curtis and others on the period of the first Qing Emperor, Shunzhi (1644 – 1661), in three more American museums in 2002; and finally a joint exhibition with the Shanghai Museum in Shanghai in 2005 with the shared aim of correcting the

neglect of the 17th century which had prevailed in China up till then.

People often ask me whether I am still collecting. In principle I am. But the Chinese are now buying back their old works of art at very high prices. Genuine good 17th century pieces are few and far between, and the famous Jingdezhen kilns where most of these things were made are creating superb copies, to be more exact fakes.

They are made with the same materials and by the same methods as in the 17th century and are virtually indistinguishable from the old ones. I have been caught out several times. So I shall be lucky if I can buy many more genuine rare ones.

I would like to thank not only the Director, Michel Polfer, but also his deputy Jean-Luc Mousset and Ulrike Degen who have worked so hard on this catalogue, and all three of whom have contributed good ideas for the brilliant display; also Tom Lucas for his lovely photographs and the visual communication agency a|part, directed by Claude Gaasch, for their superb design of the catalogue.

Outside the museum Dr Ni Yibin has identified almost all the narrative scenes, and my old friend Julian Thompson has applied his vast knowledge where mine needed to be supplemented. My daughter Katharine, who keeps the data base of the collections, has offered good advice, done a lot of work and often responded at short notice with a picture or a detail of information about a particular piece.

My thanks too to Mary Bond for all her help and hospitality in Luxembourg, to Harriet Jones for her proof reading, to Zheng Haiyao, and to Vivienne Foley. And last, but really first, Caromy Hoare has again, as she did with my Shunzhi exhibition in America and my recent exhibition in Shanghai, provided the initial inspiration and done so much of the detailed work.

I hope that “Late Ming” will work at two levels: as a new source of information about the period with some different insights, and also very simply as a display of beautiful objects.

Sir Michael Butler

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The National museum of history and art Luxembourg, by generously providing a venue for this exhibition and making it look so beautiful, has enabled me to begin to fill one of the remaining gaps in the study of 17th century Chinese porcelain. The late Ming has of course been included in several exhibitions covering the period when there were no Imperial kilns dominating the production of porcelain in China, say 1608 to 1683; but I believe that this is the first time that the spotlight has been focused wholly on the non-Imperial wares made in the period up to the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644. These objects, known until recently by Chinese scholars, rather patronizingly, as minyao (people’s or folk ware), in fact achieved new levels of quality and beauty thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of those in charge of the kilns, together with the innovative and artistic flair of the potters and painters who moved into the private sector after 1608.

1 Late Ming Porcelain from the Butler Collections Sir Michael Butler During the 16th century a large proportion of the porcelain of high quality was made in the Imperial kilns, owned and run by the Imperial Palace in Beijing; but these were closed in the first decade of the 17th century because the Imperial budget could no longer support them. A stele dated 1637 excavated at Jingdezhen records that after 1608 potters from the Imperial kilns were employed in independent kilns instead. Except for five pieces from South China (Nos 52, 53, 68, 69 and probably 57), all the porcelain shown here was made in the

non-Imperial kilns at Jingdezhen before 1644 when the great Ming dynasty collapsed in ignominy after more than 250 years in power and the last Ming Emperor, Chongzhen (1628 – 1644) hanged himself. This was a period of great change at Jingdezhen which was the centre of porcelain production for the world at the time, for the secret of how to make porcelain was unknown in Europe until it was discovered by Böttger in Meissen much later in 1709.

It began an exciting era of innovation and variety which continued into the first thirty years of the new dynasty (the Qing).

The wares made in the non-Imperial kilns were for the most part heavily potted and some lacked the fine finish given to earlier Imperial wares. Occasionally lumps of iron are to be found in the glaze or the glaze has drawn away from the rim during firing (the Japanese call this mushikui or “worm-eaten”). Equally, however, attractive new shapes were invented such as the rolwagens (Dutch name for tall cylindrical vases, known in Chinese as “elephant’s foot” vases) and the brush pots, both with flat unglazed bases.

The kilns were able by the 1630s to achieve a brilliant new underglaze blue, almost violet, sometime verging towards

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In the last twenty-five years 17th century Chinese porcelain has gradually begun to be appreciated, first in the West and now in China itself. There have been a number of general exhibitions showing porcelain of the whole century and others covering different aspects of the period, such as production during the Shunzhi reign and porcelain made specifically for Japan. The chart devised by my daughter Katharine, illustrates the late Ming period’s place in the evolution from Ming to Qing, the name taken by the following Manchu dynasty. As far as I am aware, this is the first devoted specifically to the late Ming period.

It consists of hundred pieces of porcelain.

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4)!.1)

1 Wanli (1572 - 1620) Tianqi (1620 - 1627)

Wanli / Tianqi, c. 1600 - 1625 H (with lion) 22 cm, L (box) 12 cm, W (box) 9 cm Butler Family Collection

13. Incense burner on a box base

The incense burner takes the form of a Buddhist lion seated on the top half of a box in which the incense can be placed. It has large ears laid back, curly hair, lips drawn back with a ribbon in the mouth, and an improbable broad tail. One foot rests on a ball and there is a bell round its neck. Most of these features have holes in them to allow the smoke of the incense to get out.

It is painted in a rather pale blue with dots covering the body. On each side of the box there is a ruyi head amid geometrical patterns in a barbed panel.

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There is another example in the Tokyo National Museum, and a similar object appears in the ko-sometsuke book (Kawahara 1977, 1, No. 121), so it was probably made for the Japanese market.

Tianqi / Chongzhen, c. 1620 - 1630 H (including lid) 24 cm, D (at rim) 5 cm, D (at footring) 7 cm Butler Family Collection

21. Slender small hexagonal wine pot with a lid 48

The body, the neck and the lid are all hexagonal in shape. The pear-shaped body runs smoothly into the narrow neck which is everted at the rim. The panels of the unusual lid curve in and then up, with an ovoid pointed knop on the almost flat top.

The spout rises almost vertically from the shoulder, narrowing towards the top, in a slender s-shape. It is joined to the neck with a supporting bar. The handle is also joined to the shoulder, but starts almost horizontal, and then gently rises vertically to the level of the rim before curving down to join the middle of the neck.

On one side of the body a gentleman is greeting a boy carrying a qin with a willow tree behind them. On the other side, a gentleman holds a flower in his right hand while turning to the left to speak to a servant who carries a basket of flowers. Above the shoulder there is a daisy scroll and on each side of the neck a formal tulip.

The pot was made for the Dutch market, probably before the High Transitional style became fashionable.

Chongzhen, c. 1630 - 1640 H 3.5 cm, D (at rim) 20.5 cm, D (at footring) 13 cm Butler Family Collection

44. Dish with a man riding a donkey

Its centre is flat. The cavetto is divided into six panels, each moulded to give a gentle wavy effect with the light brown rim lobed to match the ends of each panel. The footring is undercut and has some grit. The base is glazed, with numerous pin holes.

It is painted in underglaze blue and red, green, yellow, aubergine, turquoise and black. In the centre a scholar rides a trotting donkey with a boy running behind trying to keep a turquoise umbrella over him. There are typical rocks and a pine with a thin horizontal cloud across it. In the six panels of the cavetto, three have the “friends of winter” (pine, prunus and bamboo), and the other three a man in a boat, a man on a donkey and two men playing weiqi. Round the centre scene and round each of the latter three panels there are borders with geometrical patterns, red and blue alternating.

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The back is undecorated except for a small underglaze blue Fu seal mark in the centre of the base.

Chongzhen, c. 1634 - 1643 H 28 cm, D (at rim) 13.5 cm, D (at footring) 14.5 cm Butler Family Collection

83. Baluster jar 122

It is very heavily potted, the baluster body everted towards the footring, which is stepped. There is an incised daisy scroll between incised double lines on the shoulder and a simple double line border above the foot.

It is painted with a man with a sword on his back on a galloping horse, brandishing a whip. He is followed by four running retainers, one holding a flaming torch. A senior official, with a servant carrying his three-tiered umbrella, is seen behind some rocks.

There are ticks for grass, layered rocks and a “back” to frame the picture, consisting of bare trees and vertical layered rocks with formal horizontal clouds across them. There is a section of crenellated wall with two vertical mountains behind it. On the neck, just below the rim, there are alternating large and small downward pointing banana leaves.

The story is probably the same as that on No. 23. Xiao He, who was lieutenant to Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty, is seen galloping after Han Xin, a talented general who felt that he was not being treated fairly by Liu Bang and was planning to desert him. Xiao He was hoping to persuade him to change his mind.

This shape is very rare with the High Transitional style of painting, but a version of it became fashionable towards the end of the century.

SELECT bibliography Butler Michael: Chinese Porcelain: the Transitional Period, 1620 – 1683. A Selection from the Michael Butler Collection. Exhibition catalogue; Leeuwarden, Museum het Princessehof, Leeuwarden 1986.

Butler Michael, Medley Margaret and Little Stephen: Seventeenth-Century Chinese Porcelain from the Butler Family Collection.

Exhibition catalogue by Art Services International, Alexandria (Virginia) 1990.

Butler Michael, Curtis Julia B. and Little Stephen: Treasures from an Unknown Reign: Shunzhi Porcelain, 1644 – 1661 (with essays by Qianshen Bai, Yibin Ni and Evelyn S. Rawski).

Exhibition catalogue by Art Services International; Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas, and University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, Alexandria (Virginia) 2002.

Butler Michael: Seventeenth Century Jingdezhen Porcelain from the Shanghai Museum and the Butler Collections. Beauty’s Enchantment (with an essay by Wang Qingzheng). Exhibition catalogue; Shanghai, Shanghai Museum, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2006.

Mino Yutaka and Robinson James: Beauty and Tranquility. The Eli Lilly Collection of Chinese Art. Exhibition catalogue; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapols (Ind.) 1983.

Rinaldi Maura: Kraak Porcelain. A Moment in the History of Trade, London 1989.

Sheaf Colin and Kilburn Richard: The Hatcher Porcelain Cargoes, the Complete Record, Oxford 1988.

Volker T.: Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company as recorded in the Dagh-Registers of Batavia Castle, those of Hirado and Deshima and other contemporary papers, 1602 – 1682 (Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, 11), Leiden 1954.

Welsh Jorge: Zhangzhou Export Ceramics: the so-called Swatow Wares. Exhibition catalogue, London 2006.

Yibin Ni: The Anatomy of Rebus in Chinese Decorative Arts, in: Oriental Art, vol. 49, 2003, 3, p. 12-23.

Curtis Julia B.: Chinese Porcelains of the Seventeenth Century: Landscapes, Scholars’ Motifs and Narratives (with an essay by Stephen Little). Exhibition catalogue; New York, China Institute Gallery, Seattle / London 1995.

Curtis Julia B.: Trade Taste and Transformation: Jingdezhen Porcelain for Japan, 1620 – 1645 (with contributions from Stephen Little and Mary Ann Rogers, edited by J. May Lee Barrett). Exhibition catalogue; New York, China Institute Gallery, New York 2006.

Jenyns Soame: Ming Pottery and Porcelain, London, 2nd edition, 1988 (previous edition 1953).

Jenyns Soame: The Wares of Transitional Period between the Ming and the Ch’ing 1620 – 1683, in: Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, IX, Kansas City 1955, p. 20-42.

Kawahara Masahiko: Ko-sometsuke. Old Underglaze Blue Porcelain, 2 vol., Kyōto 1977.

Kerr Rose and Wood Nigel: Ceramic Technology (with contributions from Ts’ai Mei-Fen and Zhang Fukang), in: Kerr Rose (ed.): Chemistry and Technology (Science and Civilisation in China, series founded by Joseph Needham, vol. 5), Cambridge 2004, pt. 12.

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Kilburn Richard S.: Transitional Wares and their Forerunners. An exhibition presented by the Oriental Ceramic Society of Hong Kong.

Exhibition catalogue; Hong Kong, Urban Council Hong Kong at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong 1981.