IMARI OR OLD JAPAN.--The many kilns that sprung up in the province of Hizen during the
[Illustration: _PLATE XXIV._ 1. CHINESE. 2. JAPANESE.]
course of the seventeenth century, along the slope of the hills that produced both the china-stone and the china-clay, were chiefly occupied in making blue and white porcelain, the _sometsuke_ or ‘dyed’ ware of the Japanese, and this, we may add, is still the case.
The underglaze blue indeed has always remained the dominant element in the Imari porcelain, and to judge by the older pieces the employment of other colours crept in gradually. This blue is generally of a peculiar dark lavender or slaty tint, and with the addition to it of a little gilding we obtain already the general effect of the ‘old Japan’ decoration. When to the blue and gold was added an opaque iron-red (from this pigment the Japanese succeeded in obtaining a great variety of fine tints), we attain to a scheme of decoration which, at first sight, gives the impression of being built up with a full palette of colours; this is the typical _nishiki-de_ or ‘brocaded’ ware of the Japanese (PL. I.). Indeed in many of the finest specimens we find nothing beyond these three colours--blue, red, and gold. But the blue, derived from the native ore, the concretionary ‘wad,’ containing generally more manganese than cobalt, is often wholly or in part replaced as the dominant colour by a glossy black painted over the glaze, and this, too, in specimens with some claims to antiquity. The other colours of the Chinese ‘pentad,’ the green, the yellow, and the purple, generally occupy quite subordinate positions. It is to be noted that in this ware we never find the blue applied as an enamel _over_ the glaze.
It would be a mistake to regard the whole series of Imari enamelled porcelain as made only for exportation. It is true that the large vases and plates with the well-known effective but somewhat overloaded decoration are not found in Japan, although such pieces have been made at Arita for the last two hundred years for exportation from Nagasaki; but the more quietly decorated ware of Imari, in endless forms and with decoration of the most varied kind, has long been in general domestic use, and many smaller pieces of great artistic beauty have been lately obtained from Japanese collections.[120]