89 Up until the mid-seventeenth century, the only porcelain to be shipped to Europe was Chinese blue-and-white. Around this time, internal turmoil in China due to fall of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) greatly disrupted the export of porcelain and eventually also had a severe detrimental effect on the production in Jingdezhen, the main centre for porcelain manufacture. Since porcelain was in such high demand, the VOC switched its principal focus to Japan, where the Dutch were the sole European power allowed to trade with the Japanese, and this only from the artificial island of Deshima.3 Although the secret of porcelain manfuacture had only been discovered in Japan in the early seventeenth century, workshops quickly developed objects of the highest quality. The first shipments from Japan contained not only the familiar blue-and-white pieces, but also porcelain with vibrant polychrome decoration, which was a novelty for European customers and quickly gained popularity in high society. Arita, the main production centre of Japan, manufactured two main lines of porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon. An excellent example of the latter is a pair of large jars (missing their covers) decorated in the Kakiemon-style palette (fig. 1). In Europe, pieces such as these are now found almost exclusively in (former) noble collections such as the British Royal Collection, the Porzellansammlung in Dresden, which is essentially the former collection of Augustus the Strong (1670–1733), and the collection at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin. The finest Kakiemon porcelain is characterized by a milky white body (nigoshide) decorated with overglaze enamels, as exemplified by an octagonal bowl with a decoration of the ‘three friends of winter’ (pine, bamboo and plum) in the Liechtenstein collection (fig. 2). This type of porcelain was expensive to produce, and each piece needed to be fired in its own separate protective fireclay case, or ‘saggar’. 2 The English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) were established in 1600 and 1602 respectively. They soon became the dominant European trading powers present in Asia, superseding the Portuguese and the Spanish, who had held this position during the sixteenth century. 3 Deshima island was initially created by the Japanese for the Portuguese to trade from, and to restrict their movements on the mainland. In 1639, however, there was a general ban on European trading with Japan, with the one exception of the Dutch VOC, which was allowed to stay. Its employees were stationed on Deshima and had very little or no access to Japan itself. Fig. 2 Octagonal bowl with the Three Friends of Winter Japan, Arita, Edo period, c. 1670/1690 Porcelain, enamel colours LIECHTENSTEIN. The Princely Collections, Vaduz–Vienna Inv. PO 1880
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