Jug with Portuguese arms, c. 1520–40. Jingdezhen porcelain, height 18.7 cm (7 3/8 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 61.196. Public Domain.
The coat of arms on this jug is upside down. The Met identifies it as the Portuguese royal arms and dates the vessel to about 1520–40. Made in Jingdezhen, it brings a European emblem onto a Chinese porcelain body. Its shape adds another connection: the museum traces it to Islamic metalwork made for the Near Eastern market.
That combination is a useful starting point for looking at Chinese porcelain in museum collections. Place of manufacture, vessel shape and painted decoration can tell different parts of an object's story.
Start with the outline
Before examining the emblem, follow the jug from its flared mouth down to the spreading foot. A narrow neck opens into a rounded lower body. The blue decoration occupies only part of that pale surface, leaving the outline easy to follow.
The coat of arms commands attention because so much of the surrounding porcelain is left plain. Look at the surviving attachment on the left, too. The photograph records the object as it has reached us, with its losses visible.
A commission crossing cultures
The collection record explains the inverted arms as a misunderstanding by the painters. We are looking at a requested symbol translated into a material and a form already shaped by other traditions.
In their essay on Chinese export porcelain, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Jeffrey H. Munger describe how Portuguese trade brought more Chinese porcelain to Europe during the early sixteenth century. Later export commissions included forms familiar to overseas buyers and services decorated with their coats of arms. Buyers' requests affected both what potters made and what painters put on it.
A carved bottle, a painted plate
Two other objects at The Met help widen the comparison. The first is a late thirteenth-century Qingbai bottle from Jingdezhen. Here the decoration is incised and carved beneath a bluish glaze. There is no blue painted emblem to draw the eye; the leafy scrolls emerge through changes in the surface.
Qingbai was itself traded overseas. The bottle's record describes the ware's reach from Jingdezhen to Japan, Southeast Asia and East Africa. Chinese porcelain had a life beyond China well before the Portuguese commissions.
The second object makes its patron part of the decoration. This plate, dated 1725–30, belonged to a service made for John Elwick of Cornhill, London, a director of the English East India Company. Its museum record identifies it as Chinese porcelain made for the British market.
On the plate, decoration spreads from the central arms to small scenes and the patterned rim. On the jug, the emblem sits within a much quieter field. Placing the photographs together makes the difference apparent before either date is read.
What we look for
At Azure Blanc, this is also where we begin when selecting contemporary porcelain: with the relationship between the decoration and the vessel carrying it. The jug leaves room around its emblem; the Qingbai bottle asks for a closer look at a carved surface. More ornament is not the only way a piece can hold attention.
Our Jingdezhen page follows the making tradition into contemporary work. Here, return to the jug and look once more at the space around the coat of arms. That plain porcelain is part of the composition.
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