Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1626 The Four Ming Dynasties

At this time, there was a soft knock on the door. The sound was very special. Zhou Zhi knew it was the sound of a pipe hitting the door. An Siyuan came to see him for dinner.

Zhou Zhi had been running around outside these days, but An Siyuan was quite indulgent towards him. He would smile every day as he looked at the packages being signed for. In the evening, he would invite Zhou Zhi to dinner and listen to him talk about his day's gains.

A big shot like him certainly doesn't need to go to antique shops to look for things anymore, as all the big antique dealers come to his door to provide service. An Siyuan is a homebody by nature, and he seems to enjoy his days in the apartment very much. In his own words, there is no place in the world with treasures as abundant as the Shaanxi Province in China decades ago, which is worth the journey.

However, seeing how happy Zhou Zhi is shopping in New York these days, he seems to have quite the same style as when he was young and full of energy.

Therefore, listening to Zhou Zhi talk about the process every day and bragging about it at the same time has become a rare pleasure for the old and the young in the evening.

Zhou Zhi opened the door, propped up the wine glass with two fingers, opened his fingers and stuck them: "Look, sir, today's harvest is not ordinary."

The relaxed and kind smile on An Siyuan's face turned into an incredibly serious look: "Is this Chenghua's grape purple?"

An Siyuan's porcelain collection is mainly Yaozhou kiln celadon, but that does not mean he did not study and collect other porcelains. For example, he collected Yuezhou kiln, Ding kiln, Longquan kiln, Ming Dynasty, blue and white porcelain, underglaze red porcelain and other porcelains from the Ming and Qing dynasties, and actively circulated them, making a lot of money.

However, Chenghua porcelain is really too precious, especially the Chenghua cups with purple color. When An Siyuan entered the antique collecting world, they were basically owned by someone with an orderly inheritance. Collectors would generally not transfer them unless in very special circumstances. Once they appeared, they would immediately attract attention, and even a big collector like An Siyuan might not be able to collect them.

Therefore, even a great figure like An Siyuan had only seen the Chenghua Grape Cup in museums.

"How about eating in my room tonight?" Zhou Zhi was in a good mood today. "I bought a box at the airport today for about a hundred dollars, and I just started to count it."

"Oh, you lucky Curly Coat." An Siyuan exclaimed. It was obvious that he also knew the story of the airport customs auction. "Who is the red hat now? Little Bonnie?"

"Bonnie is Bonnie, but she has nothing to do with small." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "She is a tall and fat guy. Oh, and we have a photo of her, a Polaroid photo."

"When I met him, he was still a little sea lion, full of energy, and his biggest dream was to inherit his grandfather's red hat one day." An Siyuan took a look at the photo: "Now... my God, he is simply a walrus."

"It seems that this circle in New York State is not that big." Zhou Zhi was somewhat amused: "Why do you all seem to know each other?"

"We'll talk about this later. Let's take a look first." An Siyuan waved his hand to signal Zhou Zhi to take a look at what he had gained today.

While An Siyuan was admiring the Chenghua grape cup, Zhou Zhi began to open the rest of the "blind boxes".

The small box was actually full of cups. In addition to the horseshoe cup just now, there were also high-foot cups, jar cups, bell cups, lotus seed cups, lipped cups, and bamboo hat cups...

As for painting colors, in addition to Chenghua Doucai, there are also later pastels, five colors, and enamel colors.

In addition to the Chenghua grape cup, there are also cups from the Xuande, Jiaqing and Wanli dynasties, namely the Xuande Doucai flower and butterfly pattern cup, the Jiaqing Doucai figure cup, and the Wanli blue and white five-color baby play pattern cup. The cups of the Ming Dynasty, the last three generations, are actually imitations of the Chenghua, with a body as thin as a cicada's wing, a rich blue and white color, and a combination of light and dark colors. Because the space available for creation is very cramped, the paintings are relatively simple, all of which are flowers and plants with "no leaves turning sideways", and the figures are "single clothes in four seasons". The face, eyebrows, eyes and nose are all composed of a single stroke, as thin as a gossamer, and even full of a kind of crudeness of folk kilns.

But the colors used are very careful: bright red like blood, apricot yellow with a slight red tint, water green, leaf green, and mountain green are more transparent like watercolors, while purple requires a matte glass glaze, otherwise it will be dull. Among them, ochre purple is dull, grape purple is transparent like grapes, oil red is heavy and bright, and turmeric yellow is thick but weak.

Each cup will not use all the colors, but of course not too few. Generally, three to four colors will be arranged according to the picture design.

Among the Doucai artifacts known currently, only the Doucai scroll leaf pattern vase from Chenghua used one or two colors, the Chicken-patterned Cup used five or six colors, and the rest basically selected three or four colors. The peacock blue and peacock green, which had been created in the Ming Dynasty, have never appeared on Doucai cups.

Small and exquisite, dignified and round, elegant and graceful. Whether it is the body, shape, picture, or color, the "temperament" of the Ming Dynasty Doucai small cup is unified.

This is the highest level of Ming Dynasty porcelain and even ancient porcelain craftsmanship. It has also become a model that many emperors of later generations have madly pursued, reproduced, imitated, and inherited and carried forward.

The four cups are all very impressive when viewed individually, but when compared together, it can be seen that Cheng kiln is still the best, followed by Xuan kiln, and the rest are Jiawan.

The rest of the cups all date back to the third period of the Qing Dynasty.

"George, it seems that you Chinese have three subdivisions of the Doucai porcelain of the Four Dynasties of the Ming Dynasty?"

Just as Zhou Zhi carefully took out a Kangxi enameled cricket gourd cup, An Siyuan looked at the four small Ming Dynasty cups and asked.

"This classification is actually the understanding of an important Chinese porcelain book, Nanyao Notes." Zhou Zhi recalled: "The author of this book is unknown, and the year of writing the book is said to be Yongzheng, Qianlong, or whatever dynasty it was in. It divides five-color porcelain or 'five-color porcelain with blue and white decoration' into three types: five-color, doucai and tiancai."

"These three types of porcelain are actually white with blue and white, and then decorated with colorful overglaze. However, the book believes that colorful porcelain specifically refers to porcelain that does not use blue and white lines as the backbone lines. Its status is just the same as other color materials. Some porcelains don't even have blue material at all."

"The use of various colors is like watercolor painting. This painting method is quite similar to the painting method of 'boneless flowers' in traditional Chinese painting. The book calls it five colors."

"Doucai means that blue and white begins to act as lines, but is only used as a large framework, and the colors are dotted around the large framework to form the picture."

"For example, when depicting sleeves, blue and white is only used to depict the bottom contour of the sleeves and the folds of the cuffs, while the upper part is filled with color to form the entire sleeve. This combination of the two is called 'doucai' in mathematics."

"The color filling is simple. It is similar to the rubbing method of ancient calligraphy - double hook brush method, similar to fine brushwork and line drawing. The areas that need to be filled with color are first outlined with blue and white, and then the color material is filled in the closed area. This method is called color filling."

"However, since the number of doucai porcelains was not too large, later scholars thought that these were differences in painting techniques, so they simply did not subdivide them. They only used the presence or absence of underglaze blue and white as a distinction to divide this type of porcelain into five-color porcelain, underglaze red porcelain and doucai porcelain."

"I see. Why don't you eat first? Then we can continue."

"it is good."