Porcelain Production – a set of twenty

Chinese porcelain was first imported into Europe by the Portuguese in the 16th century, and by the late 18th century East India Company ships from Europe and America were transporting millions of pieces annually in their cargoes from Canton to the West. The first sets of Chinese paintings describing porcelain production in diagrammatic series began to reach Europe in the second half of the 18th century.
The artist illustrates the stages of porcelain production from the mining of porcelain stone and kaolin, its mixing and washing and fashioning into clay bricks, transportation, firing, decoration, packing and shipping. As with the watercolours of tea production, these illustrations set the production within a fantastic landscape: 'Once again, the processes are represented by the Cantonese painters as taking place in surroundings of idyllic rural beauty, far removed from the realities of Jingdezhen. This was the vast porcelain-producing centre some five hundred miles north of Canton, source of the empire's tablewares and of the millions of pieces exported annually, and perhaps the largest industrial complex anywhere in the eighteenth-century world. ... We should remember that it was Chinese painters who fulfilled these needs for a fantasy China. In their depiction of porcelain manufacture ... they gave a generally faithful rendering of the actual techniques involved, but in a totally unfaithful setting, reducing to gentle cottage crafts what were intensive industries.' (C. Clunas, Chinese Export Watercolours, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1984, p.27).