Marks and Monograms on European and Oriental Pottery and Porcelain

INTRODUCTION.

PART I.

ancient pottery.



IT would be a vain attempt to endeavour to particularize any country, or race of people, from whence the art of making pottery took its rise. It is one of the oldest branches of human industry, and sprang from the requirements of man, desirous of finding a convenient mode of conveying the fruits of the earth to his mouth, that the appetite might be appeased and life sustained : one of the first laws of nature. Earth, the commonest of materials, was ready to his hand ; he could not fail to observe that the rain falling upon the clay would soften and render it plastic, while the influences of the sun and air would dry and harden it. It is therefore reasonable to suppose, that the primeval races of man would naturally fashion the soft clay into rude cups or bowls, and dry them in the heat of the sun. Subsequently, as the human race became dispersed over the face of the globe, either by conquest, colonization, or other causes, peculiar methods of mixing the clays, conventional forms and ornamentation, would be manifested by each, and we should thus be enabled to trace most of the vessels to their source and appropriate the varied productions of keramic artists with some degree of certainty.

" Like the history of all other arts, the history of pottery has not escaped the blending with it of a large amount of apocryphal anecdote and romance. Perhaps pottery—the art of moulding and hardening clay





—may claim to be the mother of all the arts. Necessity would soon prompt the attempted manufacture of a vessel to hold liquids ; for neither of the methods of satisfying thirst adopted by Gideon's men would long sufiice. Convenience and refinement would alike urge an improvement; and the first footmark in the clay, hardened by a Mesopotamian sun, would suggest the material and manner of its construction ; and from Eve's first rude pipkin to the latest production of Wedgwood or Cope-land, it would simply be a series of improvements. Thus to draw upon the apocrypha of pottery, a servant boils brawn in an earthen pipkin, and carelessly permitting it to boil over the fierce fire, the alkali combines with the earthenware, and the result is a vitreous surface—the first specimen of glass-glazing.

"The first historic records of fictile clay are the bricks of Babel; the next the brickmaking of the Israelites, indicating an advanced and systematic art.

" The inventor of pottery, artistically so called, was Coroebus of Athens, in whose honour the aesthetic Greeks struck medals and erected statues. Phidias himself designed vases for the Athenian potters ...