* 3 Eva Stroeber

Quiet Elegance The Ru yao brush washer in the collection of the Princessehof Museum, Leeuwarden

One of the most spectacular objects in the collection of the Princessehof Museum, Leeuwarden is a small round dish referred to by an inner circle of Princessehof colleagues as our ‘Ru pindabakje’. The small dish has a diameter of only 13 centimeters and a grey-blue glaze with a lavender tone, finely cracked. The sides of the vessel are slightly rounded and thinly potted, particularly around the rim. The base is fully glazed and has three tiny spur

Quiet E le g ance marks. The dish is not decorated (figs. 1 and 2). This small and modest object would therefore not look spectacular to most museum visitors. If spotted in a flea market, a maximum of 20 Euro would probably be offered to the owner; it would have no chance of being displayed in a ‘popular exhibition’, which has to attract tens of thousands of visitors, because it definitely does not look like a ‘wow object’ so much loved by museum public relations departments.

So what is the story behind this modest piece, which is in fact one of the most important, rare and valuable objects in the collection; the only piece of Ru ware not only at the Princessehof, but in any museum of the Netherlands? The small dish has been published several times1 and is usually on display, but it might be of interest here to tell its story in the context of new research.

Provenance

The small dish was given to the museum in 1981 by Johanna Margrieta Hendriena (Joop) Coulingh (1902-1998), from Zutphen. It was part of a collection of circa 100 objects, including Chinese export ceramics, Korean, Vietnamese and Thai ceramics, donated in memory of her late husband dr. ing. H.R.A. Muller (who died around 1980). Muller had worked in the field of agricultural engineering and had been based on Java in the Dutch East Indies. While living there, he had developed a passion for ceramics; he collected Chinese export ceramics and wrote a book on Javanese terracotta from the Majapahit period in East Java (13th-15th century), the last Hindu- Buddhist culture in Javanese history.2

The small Ru dish does not actually fit into the collector’s usual taste. It seems that he acquired it while on leave in the Netherlands around 1950 from the art dealers Aalderink in Amsterdam for a rather low price. Did he know what he had acquired? Did the dealer know what he had sold to Dr. Muller?

Appreciation for Ru ware in China

Every culture has its specific aesthetic ‘icons’. For Chinese ceramics, it was

and still is the famed Ru-ware (Ru yao in Chinese), whichDownloaded was from already Brill.com10/04/2021 highly 12:34:08AM via free access 4

Fig. 2 appreciated by Chinese collectors and connoisseurs during the Southern Side-view of the Song dynasty (1127-1279). brush washer. Ru ware was produced specifically for the imperial court at the end of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1125). The first reference to imperial Ru ware is a record by Xu Jing (1091-1153) in his Xuande fengshi Gaoli tujing (Illustrated Record of the Xuande Envoy to Koryo), from the year 1123. Xu was a diplomat and a member of a Chinese delegation to the court of the Korean Koryo-dynasty (918-1392). During the Koryo period, beautiful celadons were made by Korean potters and used by the elite at court and in Buddhist monasteries. Xu Jing compared the celadon wares of Koryo to “the new wares from Ru prefecture”. Ru wares, according to Xu Jing, had replaced Ding wares at the Chinese court.3

A more explicit record for the use of Ru ware at the Chinese court can be found in the Tanzhai biheng (Notes for the Tranquil Study) by Ye Zhi, an author from the early Southern Song period: “In this dynasty, the white wares from Dingzhou being flawed by unglazed mouth rims, the court deemed it unfit for use, and orders have been handed down for green wares to be fired at Ru prefecture”.4 Ding wares were made in kilns in the northern province of Hebei in a variety of shapes and qualities. The finest were selected for use at court. However,

all these wares were fired upside down and thereforeDownloaded the rim fromoften Brill.com10/04/2021 had to be 12:34:08AM via free access 5 covered with a bronze band to disguise the unglazed edge. It was therefore rather rough to use. Ru wares, fired in saggers, were considered more ‘perfect’.

It seems that Ru wares were most exclusive, being reserved for imperial use only and not for the ‘art market’ – already flourishing under the Song dynasty. In 1192, the scholar Zhou Hui remarks in his Qinghe zazhi (Literary and artistic journal): “The Ru wares fired for the imperial court are restricted and they use agate in the glaze. Only those that have been rejected are allowed to be sold, but they are difficult to obtain.”5

It is generally agreed that imperial Ru ware was only made over a very short period, during the reigns of the Zhezong (1086-1100) and Huizong (1101- 1125) emperors. Whether these emperors had any personal influence on Fig. 3 the production of ceramics is difficult to say, but in the case of the Huizong Emperor Huizong (1082-1135), Finches emperor it seems highly probable. and Bamboo (detail), The Huizong emperor was a sophisticated connoisseur, a passionate collector handscroll, ink, colour of art and himself a talented artist. He founded a famous painting academy and lacquer on silk, in the capital Bianliang, now Kaifeng. By looking at the paintings of Huizong, h. 27,9 cm., l. 45,7 cm., for instance the small studies of birds sitting on twigs, one discovers an Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, aesthetic concept closely related to the beauty of Ru ware: naturalness, inv. no. 1981.278. modesty, elegance and sophistication (fig. 3).6

Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 12:34:08AM via free access 6 Huizong was forced to abdicate in 1126. Over the following year, the Song lost the northern part of their glorious empire to the Jurchen nomads. The Huizong emperor himself died nine years later in captivity. The court moved to the South to establish a new capital in Hangzhou for the Southern Song dynasty. Ru ware, made in the north and already extremely rare and highly appreciated, was no longer available. It became a symbol of the lost glory of the dynasty.

During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), Ru ware became mythologized and it seems that the fame of this ware was derived rather more from rumour and literary sources than from knowledge of the real thing. Some Ru vessels were still preserved in the palace storerooms. The Qing emperors Yongzheng (r. 1723-1735) and Qianlong (r. 1735-1796) revived the Ru style and the interest in Ru wares within the imperial collections. Some Ru ware vessels in the collection of the Palace Museum in Taipei bear poetic inscriptions by the Qianlong emperor.7

Appreciation for Ru ware in the West

The appreciation of Ru ware in the West started with Sir Percival David (1892-1964), the great British connoisseur and collector. In 1935-36, ten examples of Ru ware lent by the Chinese government were displayed in the International Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy in London; the Western public could see these mysterious pieces of priceless Chinese ceramics for the first time. In 1937, Sir Percival David published A commentary on Ru Ware in the Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, London.8 In this pioneering article, he recorded Chinese literary references to Ru ware and established this ware as a Northern Song imperial ceramic. Unsurprisingly, he also managed to acquire the greatest collection of Ru ware outside the Chinese Palace collections in Taipei and Beijing, which is now on display in the British Museum, London. The collection comprises fourteen pieces of Ru ware.9 I think it is no coincidence that the special beauty of Ru ware was discovered by the West only in the 20th century. Fired clay, as a non- precious material, perfectly accorded with the ideals of the Chinese literati: simplicity, modesty, naturalness. Ru ware complies with demanding criteria for perfect proportions, the structure of the glaze and tactility. In many ways, Song connoisseurs anticipated modern design movements in the West.

The Discovery of the Ru kilns

Ru yao can be translated as ‘Ru kilns’, but for centuries there were only literary sources for these famous wares; it was a complete mystery as to where these outstanding pieces of Ru ware were made. Somewhere in the North of China, in a district called Ruzhou, but where exactly? In all these records there was no precise information on the location of the actual kiln site. The discovery of the Ru kilns had to wait until the end of the 20th century.

In 1950, a kiln site was discovered at Qingliangsi, a small place in the northern province of Henan, where 1,977 shards resembling Ru ware were

unearthed. In 1986, Wang Qingsheng (1931-2006), Downloadedat that time from Brill.com10/04/2021deputy 12:34:08AM via free access 7

Fig. 4 director of the Shanghai Museum and one of the most important authorities Kiln of the Mantou-type on Chinese ceramics, was approached by a businessman called Wang at Pengcheng, Hebei Luixian. He showed him a piece of broken pottery that Wang Qingsheng province. Old saggers in the wall provide good immediately recognized as a misfired shard of classic Ru ware – a kiln isolation. waster. He recalls his reaction: “I suddenly felt as though I were weightless! This was the site for which my distinguished predecessors had spent their lives in search […] I was not even looking for the Ru kiln – but here was its very existence being revealed …”.10 Wang Qingsheng raised funds for excavation of the site where these shards had been found; the same small, sleepy location called Qingliangsi in Baofeng county, south of the Northern Song capital Kaifeng. During the Song period this area was under the administration of the Ru prefecture (Ruzhou).

The kiln was finally uncovered in 1987. Further excavations revealed 15 kiln structures, two workshops and large quantities of Ru ware. Finally, the centre of production of Imperial Ru ware had been found. The shard specimens, from the excavations begun in the 1980s, matched exactly the extant Ru wares in the Palace collections. These excavations, supervised by the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, led to a dramatic development in the study of Ru ware. The excavation reports were published 11 in English in 1991. Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 12:34:08AM via free access 8

Fig. 5 Three tiny spurs on the bottom of the brush washer.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 12:34:08AM via free access 9 In 1999-2000, two new production sites for Ru ware were discovered: Wenmiao and Zhanggong Xiang. The Zhanggong Xiang kilns are located close to the Ru kilns at Ruzhou, Henan, and produced clay that was slightly whiter than the clay at the Ru kilns.12

Technology

Ru wares were made of buff coloured stoneware; they have subtle greyish blue-green glazes and, apart from the beautiful crackles in the glaze, no or only highly restrained decoration.

The Ru kilns discovered and excavated at Qingliangsi were of a type called mantou, referring to a round, steamed dough bun that people in the north of China enjoy for breakfast. This type of kiln is characterized by a rounded horse-shoe shape (fig. 4).

The body of Ru ware is dense and varies from near white to a buff-grey – in Chinese described as “the colour of incense ash”. As most analyses show,13 Ru glazes were essentially lime glazes with above average levels of alumina. This oxide balance encouraged smooth stony surfaces when under-fired between 1200 and 1250 degrees, and a tendency to glassiness when over- fired. The low titanium levels and good reduction encouraged fine bluish tones from the reduced iron. The glaze covers the whole body, including the base. To avoid damaging the glaze surfaces during firing in the kilns, these ceramics were placed atop tiny spurs called ’sesame seeds’. Ru wares are fully glazed, to prevent re-oxidation of the body at the end of the firing cycle. Unlike the white glazed Ding wares, with the bronze ring over the unglazed rim, Ru wares were fired upright in saggers, with either three or five tiny spur marks on the base.

The outstanding aesthetic appeal of Ru ware is the glaze: subtle, greyish blue or green, with fine crackles. The network of crackles was meant to favour comparison with the veining of jade and to give the vessel a more rarefied antique appearance. These beautiful pieces, covered all over with a luminous glaze, were precariously balanced in the kiln on stilts which left only tiny marks on the underside; they almost look as if carved from jade (fig. 5).

But there were – and still are in the collection of the Palace Museum, Taipei – a few pieces of Ru ware without crackles. These found the greatest admiration among Chinese connoisseurs. The famous Gegu yaolun (Essential criteria of antiquities) of 1388, written by Cao Zhao, a connoisseur of the early years of the Ming dynasty, states: “Ru ware was also made in the North (…) pieces with ‘crab’s claw’ markings are genuine, but those lacking the markings are extremely fine. Its body is unctuous and very thin, and examples are very difficult to obtain”.14

Terminology

One of the pleasures in appreciating Ru wares concerns the names given by Chinese connoisseurs to the colours of the glaze. The most common colour shade is called tian qing, ‘sky blue’. Half of the Ru pieces in the Palace

Museum Taipei are classified as ‘sky blue’. Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 12:34:08AM via free access Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 12:34:08AM via free access 11 There is also the mostly opaque ‘egg blue’, luan qing, resembling the clear blue colour of a duck’s eggshell and ‘powder blue’, fen qing, a pale greenish blue. The crackle, wen pian in Chinese, was originally a defect caused by the

Fig. 6 different shrinking rates of the body and glaze during the cooling state. Since Detail of the glaze of the beginning of the Song dynasty, crackle has been deliberately used as a the brush washer. decoration on such wares as Ru, Guan and Ge. Ru wares show different types of crackle, known as ‘crab’s claw’ markings or ‘ice crackle’. ‘Crab’s claw’ (xiezhua wen) resembles the irregular, wavy tracks left by a scuttling crab. ‘Ice crackle’ (binglie wen) has deeper cracks containing fine lines. The Princessehof Ru ware brush washer has a beautiful glaze showing ‘ice crackle’ (fig. 6). The tiny spur marks on the base are referred to in Chinese as being either ‘as small as sesame seeds’ or ‘millet shaped’. The difference leaves a poor Western museum curator very much at a loss. For a Chinese connoisseur, it would be immediately evident that ‘sesame seeds’ refers to a rather oval shape and ‘millet’ to a rather round shape of the spur mark.

The Princessehof Ru brush washer

Let us return to the Princessehof Ru yao object. When the report on the excavations of the Ru kilns was published in English in 1991, a list of extant Ru wares was included. Altogether there were 69, virtually all of them in museum collections and only six in private hands.15 In 2009, Tetsuro Degawa, director of the Osaka Museum of Oriental Porcelain, published the most complete list of the excavations carried out so far and included a new list of the examples preserved, comprising 70 pieces in total.16 Some items on former lists no longer qualified as Ru, while another six were added. The new discoveries, particularly at the kilns at Zhanggong Xiang, in close vicinity to the Ru kilns, provided not only useful confirmation of well-known pieces in museum collections, but also made it clear that there was much more diversity in form, size and decoration than ever imagined before. The washer from the Princessehof collection is not included in any of these lists. It is time therefore to put it on the map and to ask how all the information above relates to our small brush washer.

Most of the Ru imperial pieces were not just decorative but also functional items. The small dish from the Princessehof collection served as a brush washer. Brush washers were used while writing calligraphy or for painting. Brush washers are widely favoured for their delicate shapes, tremendous variety and exquisite design.

Where was the Princessehof Ru brush washer made? In the Ru kilns? How do we know? To answer these questions, I was fortunate enough to get advice from my old friend and colleague from the Palace Museum in Taipei, Yu Peichin. In October 2014, Yu Peichin visited the Princessehof Museum. Together we closely observed our Ru piece, and took many photographs. The shape, typical for a brush washer; the foot ring slightly flared outwards, to resemble the foot ring of Song lacquer; the ‘ice crackle’ glaze; and the weight are all comparable and according to the standard of classical pieces

from the Ru kiln. Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 12:34:08AM via free access 12 On the glazed base are three tiny spur marks (fig. 5). They reveal rather whitish clay, slightly different from the more greyish clay normally found on the wares from the Ru kiln. Could the Princessehof brush washer have been made in the kilns of Zhanggong Xiang, with the slightly whiter clay?

Back in Taipei, Yu Peichin asked me to take the exact measurements of the distances between the spur marks and the distance between spur marks and foot rim. She compared all the data with comparable pieces from the collection of the Palace Museum Taipei, and confirmed that the small dish from our Princessehof collection met the criteria asked for ‘classical’ Ru ware. It can even be compared with a brush washer on the base of which the Qianlong emperor had written a poem. Let’s celebrate our Princessehof Ru ‘pindabakje’!

• Dr. Eva Ströber is curator of Oriental ceramics at the Keramiekmuseum Princessehof, Leeuwarden. Before coming to the Netherlands, she worked at the Porcelain Collection in Dresden, Germany, as curator of the collection of Oriental porcelain of Augustus the Strong. Her academic background is in Chinese studies, Oriental art history and comparative religion.

Bibliography

Alessandra Borstlap, ‘Elegante verfijning en rustieke soberheid’, in: Keramika 4, 2001, pp. 22-5. Sir Percival David, ‘A Commentary on Ru Ware’, in: Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, vol. 14 (1936-1937), pp. 18-69. Tetsuro Degawa, Hokusoo Jojoo seiji: Kooko hakkatsu seika ten. Northern Song Ru ware: Recent Archeological Findings, Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, Japan, 2009. Godfrey St. George Montague Gompertz, ‘Hsu Ching’s Visit to Korea in 1123.’ in: Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society (1960-2), pp. 1-21. Barbara Harrisson, ‘In Memoriam. Een zeer genereuze weldoenster van het Princessehof. Johanna Margrieta Hendriena (Joop) Coulingh overleed op 22 februari 1998 op de leeftijd van 96 jaar’ in: Keramika 1, 1998, pp. 7-11. Rose Kerr, Song Dynasty Ceramics, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2004. Wen Fong and Maxwell K. Hearn, ‘Silent Poetry: Chinese Paintings in the Douglas Dillon Galleries’ in: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 39/3, pp. 4-80. Baiting Lin (ed.), Da guan: Bei Song Ruyao tezhan (Grand View: Special Exhibition of Ju Ware from the Northern Sung Dynasty), National Palace Museum, Taipei, 2006. H.R. Muller, Javanese Terracottas: Terra Incognita, Uitgeversmaatschappij De Tijdstroom B.V., Lochem, 1978. Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain. 1590-1960, Peter Lang, Oxford-New York, Bern, 2007. Rosemary E. Scott, Imperial Taste: Chinese Ceramics from the Percival David Foundation, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, Los Angeles, County Museum, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London Los Angeles, 1989. Rosemary E. Scott, ‘Ru Ware-A Revised View in the Light of Excavated Material’ in: Oriental Art 44/2 (1998), pp. 48-50. Sheilagh J. Vainker, Chinese Pottery and Porcelain from Prehistory to the Present, British Museum, London, 1991. Qingsheng Wang, Dongqing Fan en Lili Zhou, The Discovery of the Ru kiln: a Famous Song-ware Kiln of Chin, Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, Shanghai, Hongkong, 1991. Nigel Wood, Chinese Glazes: Their Origins, Chemistry and Recreation, A&C Black, London, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, London and Philadelphia, 1999. Zhemin Ye en Ye Peilan, Collection of the Porcelain Treasures of the Ru Kiln, Beijing chubanshe, Beijing, 2002. Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 12:34:08AM via free access 13 Notes

* Photography: Johan van der Veer. 1. See for instance Borstlap 2001. 2. Muller 1978. 3. Gompertz 1960. 4. Wang, Fan en Zhou 1991: 86. 5. Kerr 2004: 29. 6. For Huizong’s painting style see Fong and Hearn 1982. 7. Lin 2006, brush-washers nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6. 8. Sir Percival David 1937. 9. Pierson 2007: 160-1 en 180-1. 10. Wood 1999: 126. 11. Wang, Fan en Zhou 1991. 12. For the findings at Zhanggong Xiang see Degawa 2009. 13. For Ru technology see Wood 1999: 126-127. 14. ibid. 15. Wang, Fan en Zhou 1991. 16. Degawa 2009.

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