Ru, not Jun

On my frequent visits to London I have established an unshakable ritual of paying at least one restorative visit to the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies at the British Museum (Room 95), now home of the Sir Percival David Collection—a room of incomparable beauty and intelligent display. There is always something new and fascinating to learn there, but last week I was struck by the extreme dangers of overzealous connoisseurship.

My old friend the Qianlong Emperor (1736–1795) was a passionate collector of Chinese antiquities and objets d’art, and, like many connoisseurs before and since, regarded his taste and knowledge as rather more unassailable than they actually were. For example, the Emperor treasured this superb bowl, a masterpiece of so-called Ru ware from Qingliangsi, Baofeng county, Henan province, a product of the marvelous Northern Song dynasty, ca. 1086–1125. Ru has long been prized as the unrivaled apogee of the long tradition of Chinese porcelain manufacture. These stonewares, of which not even fifty examples have survived outside the kiln sites (the majority in England), emanated from a small handful of kilns near the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng that were exclusively devoted to the production of objects for the Imperial court. The master potters who worked there, unknown artists of real genius, produced slightly underfired (1,200–1,250 degrees Centigrade) pale grey stoneware forms of incomparable sophistication, to which were applied comparatively thick Celadon glazes of flawless consistency ranging in color from nearly white to a deep robin’s egg greenish-blue, which, when re-fired, produced a fine and miraculously consistent craquelure. If you want to torture a Chinese porcelain specialist, express much admiration for Ru ware but then ask them what can be done to fix all the little cracks.

The Qianlong Emperor’s instinct for quality was right on the mark, but unfortunately he concluded that his bowl was an exemplum not of Ru but of Jun ware. (Although Jun ware was also produced for the Northern Song court, the Emperor should have known it looked quite different from Ru, being covered with rather less subtle turquoise and purple glazes, at times so thick and unctuous that they seem held in the process of melting away from the golden–brown underglazes.) In any event, Qianlong wrote a poem in praise of the quality of Jun ware, and had it skillfully (and indelibly) incised on the inside of the bottom of his Ru bowl—it is definitely there, but unfortunately not visible in my inferior photograph. I fancy he had the gold rim added too. (Qianlong had a soft spot for gold, indeed basically anything flamboyant.) The characters translate thus:

Jun wares were all produced at the Xiuneisi [Palace Maintenance Office]. Many dishes have survived but bowls are difficult to find. In the palace alone are stored well-nigh a hundred dishes. Yet bowls are as rare as stars in the morning. What is there, forsooth, for which a cause cannot be found? Large bowls are difficult to preserve, small dishes easy. In this I find a moral and a warning. The greater the object, the heavier the task of its care. Composed by Qianlong in the cyclical year bingwu [the equivalent of AD 1786], and inscribed by imperial order.

All of this is true, but sadly not of the bowl in question. Which, I suppose, just goes to show you that it is far better not to carve your opinions into something that might some day turn out not to be what you were for whatever reason convinced it was. Wall labels and catalogue entries are far safer, and more easily corrected.

Curatorial language problems

Not wishing for a moment in any way to diminish the fine work of the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies at the British Museum—because their new galleries are truly breathtaking—I have noticed another bothersome instance of sloppy curatorial language that is beginning to crop up rather more often than it should, along the lines of that irritating “would have been” formulation I mentioned a little while ago.

In connection with an item of Ru ware of the Northern Song dynasty, for instance, which many connoisseurs regard as one of the absolute pinnacles of Chinese ceramic art, the author of the pertinent catalogue entry states that certain qualities of shape and decoration “make it incredibly rare even within this exceptional group.”

Rarity is a strange bird, and difficult to quantify without getting bogged, but in this, as in several other stray cases of “incredibly this” and “incredibly that,” the semantic point is that, in whichever context, the object in question is exceedingly rare, and the point of saying so is therefore to make it amply clear that this fact is, or ought to be, entirely credible.

Indeed, there are occasions when “incredible rarity” may justify careful investigation lest this very quality give rise to anxieties about the authenticity of the object so described. It is among the most useful alarm bells in the mind of the curator that fakes and forgeries may from time to time strike us as being simply too good to be true. And among the commonest reasons why forgers get busy in the first place is to take full advantage of the excitement arising from the “discovery” of an object of superabundant rarity. In the circumstances widespread credulity is their greatest asset, and our greatest hazard—especially when we allow the discrete questions of quality (on one hand) and rarity (on the other) to get thoroughly mixed up.

As far as I am aware there is no question of this sort hanging over the exquisite oval Henan brush washer (above), with its pale green, exquisitely “crackled” glaze, characteristic of Ru ware, and while those delicately incised fish motifs in the clay underneath make it indeed an object of great rarity, the expression “incredibly rare” will not do, any more than in prose we may invoke “hens’ teeth,” or any other form of hyperbole. Incredible does not even function as a viable contranym, although nowadays there are plenty of people who seem to feel that it does.

Sir Percival David at the British Museum

Upon much reflection it seems to me that among the hardest aesthetic qualities to describe in words are the instinctive judgment of shape, feeling for pure form, and exactness of proportion that characterize the very greatest Chinese ceramics—much harder still because of the unique combination of overall simplicity of design, the complexity and exactness of decoration (actually indivisible from the form), and to some degree a paucity of absolute points of reference, other than neck, shoulder, body, and foot. By what miraculous process of learning and practical synthesis, for example, did the anonymous Qing dynasty artists of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province attain the astonishing result you see here? Look at the total assurance of that slightly upward swell in the body, the exquisite lines of the profile, so perfectly matched with the volume, and the daring contrapuntal harmonies of angled spout and slightly tapering handle in relation to the whole—not the slightest hint of any awkwardness or discontinuity at the joins. Look at that unctuous underglaze in the palest, almost imperceptible blue, not too glassy, not too dull, and fired with absolute evenness and consistency. Look at that brilliant crowning flourish of the shapely little handle on the perfectly sunken lid, with its intriguing hint, moreover, toward organic asymmetry at the joins. See how the maker and decorator work hand in glove to produce a seamless elision of shape and motif, ground and surface, branch and void. Those overglazed trees (rendered in doucai, the “interlocking colors” of sage green, eggplant, and brown) are the suihan sanyou, the “Three Friends of Winter,” in other words a pine, some stems of bamboo, and branches of prunus picked out so exactly in flecks of red enamel—the auspicious plum, the first blossoms to arrive after the Chinese new year. See the confidence with which those nervy clusters of lines, the principal decorative motifs, and the bold composition cleave not merely to each other with such effortless felicity, but to the defining shape of the finished vessel—a ewer, for domestic use, less than five and half inches tall. Lesser wares tossed to the export market in this period were by comparison skinny, lumpy, fussy, wobbly, crusty, or fat. This is the real thing, made expressly for someone who knew exactly how great it ought to be. If you had to define the highest achievements of human culture and civilization you could do far worse than to allow this little object to do all the talking. And the newly refurbished galleries in which you can see this and many other masterpieces of Chinese ceramic art from the collection of Sir Percival David in the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies at the British Museum are among the most thoughtfully arranged, and, incidentally, beautiful that I have seen for many years. Two weeks afterwards the small hairs on the back of my neck are still standing on end, and refuse to stop tingling. There is a wholly intriguing remark at the beginning of the second sentence of Regina Krahl’s essay in the museum’s elegant new “highlights” publication. About the original scholar–collector Sir Percival David, second baronet, a member of the wealthy Sassoon banking family, who died in 1964, she writes: “Little is known about his personal or professional life.” Given the scale and quality of his achievement, and that of his partner and amanuensis, Lady David, I wonder how on earth this is possible?

Garden and Cosmos

As usual the British Museum blows its competitors—if that is the right word—out of the water. Because just now in Bloomsbury you can see at least three exhibitions or new displays of supreme quality and startling intellectual power, the kind of aesthetic experiences that stay with you for years—and indeed in certain circumstances may be for many visitors entirely transformative.

I shall go into a few of the others on another day, but first: Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur commenced at the Sackler in Washington, D.C., shuttled to London via Seattle, and will conclude at the National Museum of India in New Delhi later this year and into 2010. There is still time to catch up with it.

Many years ago the National Gallery of Victoria purchased for Melbourne a major collection of miniature paintings from Rajasthan, which were shown there and in Sydney most recently in the exhibition Rajput: Sons of Kings (2004–05).

Impressive certainly, but what the court painters of Jodhpur achieved (and the curators now demonstrate through this beautifully chosen exhibition) was to make the Rajasthani stuff look like so many postage stamps. In artistic terms scale can be a very blunt weapon, but in these big, densely populated sheets the focus is no less sharp than that of the Rajasthani miniature painters, but the scope, the spread, the narrative energy, the splendor of palace life, the religious intensity as, for example, in the highly intoxicated pre-sex gaities of Holi, as well as the exquisite control with which the Jodhpur painters made a consistent, orderly transition from minute leaf, bud, and flower all the way up to the thundering gallop of a herd of elephants trumpeting beneath monsoonal storm-clouds (above)—all these qualities win for the artists a triple gold star for cosmic and political synthesis in landscape, and for the wholly ruthless Singhs of Jodhpur a heritage and a testament of unequalled magnificence.

Ajit Singh was put to death by his second son, Bakhat Singh, ostensibly for screwing his own daughter-in-law, Bakhat Singh’s wife, but this may have been a convenient pretext for Big Brother Abhai Singh to take over, which he promptly did. In due course, after Abhai Singh died and was succeeded by his feeble son Ram Singh, Uncle Bakhat Singh orchestrated a coup d’état  and seized power for himself. However, in due course one of the new Maharajah’s many nieces murdered him—apparently to avenge her grandfather, incidentally turning a blind eye to the small matter of semi-incestuous adultery. What goes around comes around, as we say in the United States. Incidentally, her method: the gift to Uncle Bakhat of a splendid new coat prudently steeped in poison. In other words the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Singhs of Jodhpur make the House of Atreus look like Little Women. 

This point was not lost on the court portraitists. With the greatest of respect, even whilst merrily spraying buckets of brightly colored water over his ladies during Holi, Bakhat Singh invariably manages to look like a fully paid-up, card-carrying thug. With a large and well-fed tummy also.

Certainly the climax of the exhibition is the sequence of paintings that deal with key episodes in the Ramayana, that centerpiece of Indian culture and religion—for want of a better word. Why is Prince Rama blue? And what about that intriguing army of shrewd, resourceful monkey creatures? How did the subcontinent manage over millennia to arrive at such a very sensible, realistic, and healthy attitude towards sex? And how on earth—no, really!—did the anemic English manage to keep a lid on India for so long, even taking into account the connivance of the princes, whose expediently self-seeking attitudes and internal cutthroat rivalries played so effectively into the hands of the East India Company, and afterwards the extremely under-staffed India Office in Whitehall?

None of these questions are directly relevant to the mighty aesthetic experience proffered by these paintings, especially the explicitly religious ones—for example, the fifth folio from the Durga Charit, entitled Sage Markandeya’s Ashram and the Milky Ocean, with its amazing representation of Vishnu sleeping against the flank of his gloriously tapering fifteen-headed white serpent Shesha, which forms a compact group suspended in turn over a cosmically scalloped ocean—inflected by only two discretely contrived flourishes (maybe waterspouts).

You have to hand it to those shrewd, powerful, illustrious sages, gurus, yogis, etc., who deftly exploited the anxieties of the princes in respect of seeking release from their (ample) attachment to the material world. Where better to pull the political strings than on a pleasant ashram? And the more famous your sage, the more people flocked to him, the more information he assembled from people wanting more than anything else to lay out their woes, the better to make plausible and carefully placed “prophecies” further down the line (hemmed in by convenient generalities)—in other words, rather like the Oracle at Delphi, this was a highly effective intelligence gathering system which rendered spies, phone-tapping and all the other crude methods of our era wholly unnecessary.

But, above all, I join with my dear colleague Romita Ray in loving the elephants!

Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

Bad curatorial habits seem to thrive in clusters. In almost every art museum I visited in London last week, on wall labels and in published materials relating to many different types of object, again and again I noticed the same sloppy formulation: Originally this bejeweled Portuguese breast ornament “would have been” pinned or sewn to a gown; “This carriage would have been pulled by a pair of sheep or goats, wearing blue velvet harnesses and bridles with silver buckles as mentioned in eighteenth-century inventories” (both Baroque, V. & A.); originally that rare Chinese vase “would have had” identical rings suspended from its handles (Highlights of the Sir Percival David Collection, Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies, The British Museum), and so on.

This problem is partly the result of confusing known conventions applying to certain broad categories of object and what one can definitely say about specific examples (or what one certainly cannot say about the same for lack of hard evidence).

Was this bejeweled breast ornament routinely pinned or sewn to a gown? Which of these was it? Possibly yes to both, even probably, but maybe also at different times. Either the original eyelets for needle and thread are no longer there, or the mounts have at some point been altered to suit later habits of dress. In other words, it may not be possible to know for sure—even if we have a very clear picture of how such an object was fully intended to be worn. Here is another one very much like it, in a portrait painting, say, affixed with a ribbon that is tied in a bow. Such evidence can be pretty persuasive, but it is at best circumstantial.

The glorious little pumpkin carriage for the eldest son of the Elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria, meanwhile, may or may not have been equipped with harnesses of blue velvet and bridles fastened with silver buckles, but it is something of a stretch to base this claim upon documents relating to an altogether different princely court. Here as elsewhere the curator’s quest for the telling detail translates into plain conjecture.

Finally, did the famous Yuan dynasty David vases (above) have rings suspended from their elephant-head handles, or not? If they were exactly like other examples of this shape and type, probably yes, but there is no trace of them, and you have to wonder why, if both were at some point broken, there are inconsistent traces of damage to the relevant parts of those vessels. And it is very hard to see why anyone would run the considerable risk of damage by deliberately setting out to remove them.

Maybe in each case we cannot know; but certainly we can make a reasonably plausible and well-informed guess about what craftsmen aimed for in a more general sense: (1) bejeweled Portuguese breast ornaments of this type were evidently worn pinned or sewn to a gown; (2) Chinese vases of this type were generally equipped with identical rings suspended from each handle.

Everyone wants to apply general principles or knowledge to specific objects, but to do so in English prose by means of the so-called “past unreal conditional” is a solecism because this tense calls for (positively demands) a qualifying phrase beginning with “if,” or the equivalent. Therefore, to get away with this locution, you need to say something like: “These rare Chinese vases would have had identical rings suspended from their handles had they survived the hazardous processes of firing in the kiln, or if for unknown reasons, perhaps of taste, they had not been deliberately removed at a later date, or else accidentally broken.”

All of which gives to the text a decidedly clunky texture that I suppose is best avoided.

I realize some of my colleagues get thoroughly exasperated by some of the smaller bees that find their way into my bonnet, but my gentle response to them is to echo as tactfully as possible the estimable Miss Mandy Rice-Davies who, at the Old Bailey in 1963, in connection with the Profumo scandal, whilst under cross-examination during the trial of Stephen Ward, responding to the risible claim that Lord Astor denied ever having met her, famously remarked from the witness box: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Something of the same brassy colloquialism has evidently now burrowed its way onto our wall labels and into our catalogue entries, and would have refused to budge if a few of us had not learned to love our inner stickler, and accepted that there are certain limits to what one can definitely say about the original state of very old things.