FAMILLE VERTE.--In the first triad, that of the _demi grand feu_, the turquoise blue, as we have seen, is the predominant colour. Its place is taken in the triad of the muffle-stove by the green, which in many shades of intensity, but with a prevailing leafy hue, has come to be especially associated with the enamelled wares of this reign.[57]
It would be possible to make many subdivisions of this class--the well-known _famille verte_. In the majority of cases the ground is covered by a wash of one of the colours, so as to resemble a painted glaze. It will, however, always be found on close examination that the wash is _superimposed_ on the true colourless glaze, which may generally be seen at the mouth and foot. A green of greater or lesser strength, sometimes quite a thin wash, is the commonest colour for this ground; at other times it is of a pale straw colour, or, more rarely, a purple of a poor uncertain hue.[58]
It will be observed that in the muffle-stove the fine aubergine purple that we noted in the class last described is rarely to be obtained from manganese. In all cases the white ground is only left sparingly as a reserve for the petals of flowers and for the faces. In addition to these colours--the green, the yellow, and the purple--which are for the most part used as washes, a dark brown or black is largely employed for outlining the details of the decoration, as well as for tempering the colour of the background by covering it with scrolls and spirals.
When this decoration is applied to the small moulded pieces--the _magots_, for instance, so admired by the French collectors of the eighteenth century--we have a class of objects to which the descriptions (in the Bushell manuscript and elsewhere) of the decorated ware of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries would seem to apply. As we have seen, it is at the least very doubtful whether these early pieces were decorated _over the glaze_, but in a general view it cannot fail to strike one that the Kang-he decoration, in which washes of colour[59] play so important a part, belongs to an earlier school than that of the Wan-li porcelain, with its designs and medallions scattered over a white ground. These last patterns are, it would seem, derived from textile fabrics, from the rich brocades of the time, both Chinese and, possibly, foreign. In the _famille verte_ of Kang-he’s time, on the other hand, we may perhaps see a return, in general effect at least, to the _san-tsai_ and _wu-tsai_ painted glazes of earlier Ming time.