Shards2015autumn

Autumn 2015

GREETINGS FROM OUR PRESIDENT Dear Members, Last year, at the time of our Annual Meeting, things were looking a little worrisome for the China Students’ Club of Boston. Our treasury, while not depleted, was reaching a point where we were spending more than the income derived from memberships on programs and rental of our meeting place. Our home, the College Club, had raised their rates to a point that made our continuing to meet there unsustainable. Our website had been hacked on multiple occasions which, while not a security problem, was certainly inconvenient. Lastly, our funding situation made it increasingly difficult to continue to put together an annual program of high quality and diverse lectures and trips that we have come to expect as members of the club.

It gives me great pleasure to mention several developments which have helped to improve our situation. Firstly, Lee-Ann Chellis Wessel has developed a Facebook page for the club, which is a no-cost, flexible way of communicating with our membership and informing others about who we are and what we do. Our social media presence will only be improved by the addition of new material, so please feel free to contact Lee-Ann. We are looking into upgrades for the website but thanks to Lee-Ann we have a very viable alternative.

Secondly, Jeffrey Brown has gone above and beyond in service to the club as he scouted out our new affordable and very convenient and accommodating meeting space at the King’s Chapel Parish House on Beacon St. Not only does the space provide exactly what we need, but they are also home to the Beacon Hill Seminars, a long-running educational organization (with some overlap among our membership) and Jeffrey has creatively forged a relationship between us and the Beacon Hill Seminars which will bring us increased visibility and potentially new members as our programs become part of their offerings.

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Finally, late last year the club received an unrestricted $10,000 donation which will enable Anne Lanning to continue to organize an interesting program schedule by offering speakers appropriate honoraria and assistance with travel expenses if necessary. This donation was secured by Jim Kaufman who has worked for many years to further the purposes of the club. In my experience, Jim has been someone who sees a need and then quietly takes care of it.

These are three wonderful things that have come about through initiative and follow-though on the part of club members. I encourage you all to think creatively about ways that we can expand our presence and raise our numbers. I look forward to hearing any thoughts that you might have.

With best wishes for 2016, Carolyn Parsons Roy

A NEW LECTURE SEASON BEGINS IN OUR NEW LOCATION On a very balmy September afternoon, the CSC met for the first time at its new venue, the King’s Chapel Parish House. The “getting settled” glitches were few, if any, and all went well as members were welcomed into this fine old Boston row house at the foot of Beacon Hill overlooking the Common. Our season’s opening lecture was presented by CSC member Nancy Carlisle who spoke on the topic of Hidden Ceramic Gems at Historic New England, a topic with which she is most familiar being a Senior Curator for this venerable institution.

Historic New England oversees thirty-six properties that range from 17th century ‘stone-enders’, to working farms, to riverfront homes, to a largely untouched 18th century meeting house and more.

And also under Historic New England’s care are approximately fourteen thousand ceramic objects that range from the purely aesthetically extraordinary to the plainly utilitarian. Although, the plainly utilitarian can sometimes be of greatest significance. Case in point a very unassuming stoneware pot believed to be the product of the Grace Parker Pottery in Charlestown, MA, the first successful producer of stoneware in New England in the 18th century. Other pieces, always of interest, are signed and dated wares such as a group of eight pieces of slip-decorated redware inscribed and dated 1824, believed to be by Absolom Bixler. It is certainly of no surprise that there is a large group of stonewares, crocks, jugs, etc., representing Bennington, Charlestown, Taunton, Boston, Worcester, Norwalk and Burlington potteries. One of the most impressive pieces in this group of stoneware, both in size and design, is a crock decorated in cobalt blue with an image of two spotted deer by J. & E. Norton Co. Julius Norton partnered with his brother Edward and their firm produced highly ornamented pieces decorated with buildings, birds and other animals such as the deer. It is these highly decorated pieces that are most sought-after by collectors today.

J. & E. Norton Company stoneware crock with rare spotted deer decoration.

Under the category of more “genteel” wares, Nancy illustrated a magnificent Chinese export kraakware punch bowl, an early 17th century piece, but with an interesting back-story from the 19th century. There is a small note attached to it describing how this bowl is related to two of the intellectual titans of the 19th century as it was a gift from John Ruskin, intellectual reformer at the heart of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, to the family of Charles Eliot Norton, a professor of Art History at Harvard. Norton was close friends with Ruskin, William Morris, and the artist Burne-Jones and the Norton family so treasured the bowl that it was used to christen Norton’s grand-daughter in Rome in 1904.

The Charles Eliot Norton Wanli period “kraakware” punch bowl.

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Other fine Chinese export porcelain with early historic connections include two sets belonging to Jonathan Sayward of York, ME. Sayward was a merchant mariner who served with colonial and British armies during the 1745 Siege of Louisburg where he notes in this journal that none of the officers were involved in the looting of the French fort that took place after its surrender. But, that didn’t stop of officers from buying the pieces off the soldiers who did the looting, hence, the dinner wares in his family’s (and Historic New England’s) collection today.

Another notable group of Chinese export wares belonging to Historic New England once belonged to Harrison Gray Otis of Boston. The China Trade is also represented by porcelain and an amazing ivory pagoda brought back from Canton by supercargo Major Samuel Shaw for his sisterin-law Abigail Quincy; Shaw was on the first American ship to have direct trade with China in 1787. And, when speaking of the China Trade, one cannot omit one of Historic New England’s loveliest properties, Beauport, in Gloucester, MA. It was purchased from its original owner, Henry Sleeper, in the early 20th century by Helena McCann, the heiress to the Woolworth fortune, and, a voracious collector. The house was left largely intact, and must have had great appeal to an Export collector like McCann because of its famous Chinese Parlor which was lined with two sets of original Chinese hand-painted wallpaper; one depicting rice production, the other porcelain production.

Rare China Trade wallpaper from Beauport featuring images of porcelain production.

Beauport has some fine examples of McCann’s porcelain, but, sadly, the bulk of Helena McCann’s vast collection now languishes, unseen, in storage at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The extent of Chinese export porcelain in Historic New England’s collection runs the gamut from the 17th century right up to a mid-20th century plastic set of “Willow” dinnerware, complete with plastic cranberry “glass” stemware!

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Tastes, as we know, change and that is certainly reflected in Historic New England’s collections as many well-to-do New Englanders began favoring and purchasing refined dinner services from England, Germany and France during the 19th century, as evidenced in the Rundlet-May house in Portsmouth, NH. English wares, of course, are well-represented as they were purchased from the 18th century on and include creamwares, Sadler and Green transfer-printed tiles, Liverpool, and transfer-printed wares, made for the American market as well as a large collection-about twelve hundred in all-of children’s mugs. An especially poignant piece of Wedgwood is a teapot decorated with an image of a shackled, kneeling slave, captioned, “Am I not a Man and a Brother”, part of a teaset belonging to abolitionist James Buffon.

Outstanding redware collection in the Fletcher-Little house, Cogswell Grant (left) and examples of wares from the Saturday Evening Girls Pottery (right).

The collection brings us through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th with fine examples of New England potteries such as Marblehead, Dedham, Grueby, and the Saturday Evening Girls, as well as 20th century Colonial Revivial and Mid-Century Modern wares. In addition, the collection includes a large repository of ephemera pertaining to ceramics in New England; their design, creation and retailing. All in all, a comprehensive history of New England told through pots!

CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS ARTIST DIANE CHEN SPEAKS TO OCTOBER MEETING On Thursday, October 27th, the CSC welcomed as our speaker contemporary ceramic artist Diane Chen who spoke on some of her recent work in a talk entitled, “Messages to the Future: The Ceramics of Diane KW”.

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Diane is by training a doctor and, upon retiring after a career of thirty years and moving to Honolulu, she was casting about for something to do. Having failed to get into an overcrowded jewelry-making class, she signed up for a ceramics course. And so, this story begins, as she obviously had quite a talent for the medium. After working with clay for a while, she discovered she didn’t like working on a potter’s wheel, and developed her skills with built-up wares which she then meticulously carved. A group of potters she met in her classes eventually started providing her with the vessels she could carve, and, as time progressed, these vessels got larger and larger.

About this time, now being retired and having the leisure to actually read her emails, she became interested, believe it or not, in reading a lot of the SPAM emails we all receive on a daily basis.

Now, where most people automatically click delete, Diane began saving the most “interesting” ones in a file. These actually came in handy when she was developing the themes and philosophy for her on-going work. She had some basic ideas and themes that she wanted to bring together and speak to as an artist. Her work, though creative and beautiful, was adding to the already existing clutter of the world; what about somehow re-purposing existing ceramics? Also, what could her work say about the times in which it was created? How could these “messages to the future” be preserved? She lit upon the idea of utilizing existing pieces of ceramics, onto which she would imbed decals with messages, snippets of the SPAM emails she had been saving, and then, get the pieces into museum collections where they’d be preserved for posterity. The SPAM she reasoned, was an ideal reflection of our times; they are part of our intellectual and social cultures and speak of today’s values and ethics. Fine pieces of vintage hand-painted Meissen was purchased on e-bay, onto which she would fire lines from the email SPAM. All the desperate stories for financial help, the searches for love and a soul mate, all asking for trust, all worked onto the porcelain, respecting its original integrity, and carrying Diane’s messages now into the future. And soon, the Honolulu Museum accepted some of these pieces into their permanent collection.

Diane then got interested in earlier pieces of porcelain, so she started acquiring shards of Chinese export from the famous Hatcher Cargo upon which her contemporary commentary could be told.

The porcelain was from a Dutch east India ship, the Geldermalsen which sank in 1752. The ship’s cargo was recovered in the 1980s and auctioned off with great publicity as it fetched millions of dollars at Christies Amsterdam, causing quite a bit of international controversy. Should the ship have been left on the sea bed as an archeological site reserved for study? Should museums and collectors be allowed to purchase objects recovered? Who should benefit culturally, academically and financially? Shards from the wreck were embellished with beautifully calligraphed excerpts from the period from Dutch inventories listing the ship’s cargo, as well as modern day descriptions and photos from the Christies catalog, as well as simple dollar signs $$$. The pieces were exhibited at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands and later at the Honolulu Museum.

Another interesting project Diane worked on was a permanent installation at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester. Given its strong maritime theme, Diane used 19th century China Trade shards, along with pieces of common white ironstone of the sort used aboard ships at the time, to “illustrate a conversation” between a sea captain, Edward Babson, and his wife Amanda, both of Page 5

whom kept journals while Edward was away at sea. Pieces were embellished with the couple’s daily journal entries, their portraits, and images of period ships. These were then partially embedded in an epoxy sand box and permanently mounted into the walls of the cloak room and bathrooms of the museum, sometimes leading to long lines for the loo as bathroom occupants become engrossed in the artwork!

Another on-going project of Diane’s is entitled Together Under One Roof which involves simple ceramic roof tiles. Diane’s concept was based upon her observation of mankind’s endless religious intolerance and how museums and other educational institutions are some of the few places where people coexist in a space peacefully; no one looks at someone else in a museum and objects to them being there because of their religion. Diane thought of embellishing common roof tiles with texts taken from the world’s five major religions. As museums’ roofs needed to be repaired, they would be with one of Diane’s tiles, the message being quite simple: all who visit a museum are welcome under one roof.

Other projects include a teacup series which features pairs of cups and saucers, embellished with the texts of a great historical figure and his adversary, such as Hitler and Stalin for example, asking the simple question, “How would the world have been a different place, had these two just sat down and had a nice cuppa’ together?” And also, a Persian shards series which takes actual 13th century Persian shards and embellishes them with texts that describe the looting and selling of Syrian antiquities in the early 1900s. And lastly, a series entitled Reality Check which converts the meanings of images on Norman Rockwell collectible plates that depict an idealized world to the reality of the times, modifying the original design by applying decals of swastikas and Stars of David to the characters in each scene.

We shall await now to see what Diane’s next project and message to the future shall be.

An example of one of Diane’s earlier pieces (left) and examples of her work with pieces from the Hatcher Cargo (right)

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An example of Diane Chen’s Rockport Museum installation using re-purposed 19th century ceramics embedded with excerpts of journal entries from a sea captain and his wife.

AUTUMN CONCLUDES WITH A LECTURE ON YUAN PERIOD BLUE AND WHITE Our Fall lecture series concluded with a talk by Steve Gaskin, President of the Asian Art Society of New England, who spoke to a very full house on the subject of “Adventures in Yuan Blue and White Porcelain”.

Steve’s interest in Yuan blue and white porcelain, it would be fair to say, verges on the obsessive.

He is a self-taught authority on the subject because, as he quipped, “When there are only about 200-300 intact known pieces of something in the world, it’s easy to become an authority on it”.

The historical setting for this remarkable porcelain is the Mongol empire. Genghis Khan rose out of central Asia in the 1200s and created the largest empire in the world. If one can overlook the rampant destruction and slaughter created in their wake, the Mongols were also responsible for a reformed currency, an efficient postal system, and vastly improved mercantile and maritime exchanges between China, Persia and Indonesia and everywhere in between. The beautiful porcelain they created played a role in this international commerce. It is interesting to note how this fragile commodity reached such far-flung destinations: bean sprouts! The porcelain was packed in bean sprouts, the package was soaked with water, the sprouts grew up and around the porcelain, encasing it tightly within the package. The package was allowed to dry before shipping, and upon arrival at its destination, re-watered. The sprouts disintegrated and the cargo was pulled out. Talk about green technology!

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dated 1330-1351 within an inscription on the vases which provides us with a date when this quality of blue and white was being produced, and, two, they a virtual catalog of decorative motifs used on Yuan wares. These designs are used again and again, never in the same way or pattern, but in an amazing array of combinations. Some of these images include: phoenixes, fish, water fowl, cranes, chrysanthemums, cloud collar borders, wave borders and scrolling vine borders; all figure predominantly, but never in the same way twice.

Classic examples of Yuan period blue and white, centered with an image of the world famous “Elephant Vases” in the Percival David Collection, London.

Now what intrigues Steve is that this masterful technique, this amazingly near-perfect porcelain appeared out of nowhere. The technology is perfected, the designs created, the decoration mastered-all within a twenty year span-from 1330-1351…and then it disappears for six hundred years! Yes, we all know the Chinese continued to produce blue and white porcelain down through the dynasties, but never, in Steve’s opinion, again at this level of perfection. And why, when earlier forms and decoration were generally venerated and studiously copied by succeeding reigns in traditional Chinese culture, were Yuan wares forgotten? Steve’s studies have revealed a systematic prejudice against it that has lasted for centuries: no matter how fine it was, it was the product of an alien, barbarian, empire and therefore a vulgar, second rate porcelain and reminder of China’s brief capitulation to that empire. This Chinese view tainted that of Western collectors as well.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century did connoisseurs and curators both in Britain and America start to discern differences between Ming period wares and a few other examples that started to “stand out”. These were, of course, Yuan blue and white pieces that had typically been catalogued as Ming because of their quality. And so, the search and re-assessment continues and the appreciation for these wares continues to grow, as does prices for these rare objects reach astronomical levels at auction.

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As for Steve’s research, it should more likely be called an odyssey for he has traveled the world in search of Yuan pieces and especially shards that leave a clue as to where this porcelain was sent.

Two of the greatest repositories of Yuan blue and white are the Topkapi-Serayi palace in Constantinople and Ardebil Shrine in northwestern Iran. As the cobalt needed for underglaze blue decoration originated in Persia, and the finished wares were highly prized there, it is no wonder so many extant pieces have been found there. Another fascinating location where endless shards have turned up are in East Java, once the center of a powerfully the wealthy maritime Majapahit Kingdom that controlled the trade with the Spice Islands. Steve has also visited Okinawa, Japan and found Yuan shards there, as well as his most recent destination, Delhi, India where an excavation at the Purana Qila Fortress yielded a treasure trove of Yuan shards. Steve’s theory on how these pieces ended up in all these disparate locations is that after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the newly formed Ming Dynasty needed money, and as these Yuan pieces were so highly prized by outsiders, and disdained by the Chinese, there was just a wholesale sell-off of them and they were shipped out.

Steve now has a project in mind to reconstruct the Delhi shards to resemble intact Yuan objects and mount a traveling exhibit in Delhi, China and Boston…to be continued!

Steve Gaskin at the Purana Qila Fortress in Delhi, India with some of pieces of Yuan wares re-created from excavated shards (left) and Steve’s personal collection of shards in his office (right)

BOSTON 2015 HOST TO THE AMERCIAN CERAMIC CIRCLE Over the weekend of November 5-8, Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts played host to the annual symposium of the American ceramics Circle. Before the lectures began, there were presymposium trips to the RISD Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, as well as a trip on Sunday to tour the ceramics collections at Historic New England. Lecture topics were varied, each as illuminating as the next. Some of the topics discussed were French Baroque Faience and the Gardens of Andre LeNotre, Della Robbia Sculpture and the Arts of Fire in Renaissance Italy,

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Palissy Ware at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Conservation and Technical Investigations, and Cockles and Mussels: Shells and English Ceramic Design.

The American Ceramics Circle provides some brilliant research and talks in a collegial atmosphere of like-minded enthusiasts; membership is minimal for a great newsletter and the opportunity to partake of this banquet of information. Next year’s symposium will stay close to home, being held in Hartford, Connecticut focusing on, amongst other things, the newly re-modeled Wadsworth Athenaeum.

CHINA STUDENTS CLUB PARTNERS WITH BEACON HILL SEMINARS The China Students’ Club will be partnering with the Beacon Hill Seminars this Spring and Fall, 2016, opening our lectures to their membership. The Seminars is a very active group that offers courses to its members on a wide range of subjects. When they saw the scope and quality of the talks our group provided they were delighted to be included in our offerings. Every time members of the Seminars attend one of our talks, the Club will receive a stipend towards our room rental, and, the opportunity to meet and possibly recruit new friends for our membership. It’s a win/win situation for both groups! So, if you see an unfamiliar face at a future meeting, please introduce yourself and give our new guests a warm welcome!!

POTS IN THE MEDIA Thanks to the research of my Internet roaming and tech-savvy wife, Liz Brown, a couple of ceramics-related tid-bits that might be of interest to our members have come to light. For any of you Anglophiles out there who watch The Great British Baking Show, the Brits have come up with another amateur challenge competition called The Great Pottery Throw-Down where amateur potters are assigned projects to create, are judged, and eliminated until a winner is declared. Needless to say, the show is wildly popular in the UK, but as far as we know, can only be seen on You Tube here. Also, for anyone who has an Instagram account, there is a site called Pots in Action that has photos and videos of potters and their work from all over the world which are quite amazing.

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