3 Eggshell Plate Yongzheng period circa 1730 European Market Diameter: 81⁄4 inches; 21cm Provenance: collection of James A Garland; collection of John Pierpont Morgan. A Chinese eggshell porcelain dish finely painted in famille rose enamels with a Chinese domestic scene of a lady and two boys, the rim with reserves of flowers and dragon roundels on a pink diaper ground. The Garland collection was a substantial group of Chinese porcelains that had been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 1895, described in Connoisseur Magazine as “the finest collection of old Chinese porcelain in the world”. When James Garland died in 1902 the collection was sold as one lot to the Duveen brothers and within a few hours further sold to John Pierpont Morgan. References: Michael St Clair (2016) The Great Chinese Art Transfer: How
So Much of China’s Art Came to America, Farleigh Dickinson University Press (2016), p167-8; Santos & Allen 2005, No 55, a dish with the same central scene but a different border formerly in the collection of Dr Anton CR Dreesmann; Williamson 1970, plate XXXIII, an almost identical example.
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. George Orwell, 1984
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Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. Aldous Huxley author of A Brave New World , in a letter to George Orwell after reading 1984, (Huxley was Orwell’s French teacher at Eton in 1917)