JAPANESE ART INDUSTRY IN GENERAL. 331 



As, however, in the eighteenth century, Faience with its opaque 

 tin enamel was more and more displaced by the successful opera- 

 tions of this porcelain manufacture, in Europe the Japanese pat- 

 terns vanished also, and were superseded by Chinese, as we can 

 discern especially in the older specimens of Meissen and Sevres 

 ware. The earliest products of Bottger and Tschirnhaus, the so- 

 called "red porcelain " — stone and earthenware of a reddish brown 

 jasper colour, such as eighty years later was supplied by Wedgwood 

 in England — consist mainly of tea-pots, a part of which, in colour- 

 ing, form, and decoration might be confounded with many manu- 

 factured in these days in China, V^., with those in the province of 

 Shantung. In the same way the hard porcelain made in Meissen 

 from 1709 resembles in every particular the Chinese models. 

 In later times, the decorations of Meissen, as of other places, forsook 

 more and more the East Asiatic patterns, and kept only a few 

 conventional fragments, like the blossoms of the rose, pseony, and 

 mume plum, which, deprived of their other constituent parts, they 

 combined with arabesques and other ideal decoration, forming 

 pictures which made up in symmetry and beauty of form what they 

 lacked in truth to nature. 



In Sevres too, where in 1695 they had already begun to manu- 

 facture a kind of porcelain, but did not understand before 1768 how 

 to imitate the hard Chinese variety, the decorations were at first a 

 simple copy of the Chinese, and only took on by degrees an inde- 

 pendent character. 



And now comes the noticeable and widely extended movement 

 of modern times, quite outside of all connection with these earliest 

 influences of the ceramic art of Eastern Asia on the noble pottery 

 of Europe, and far removed from them in point of time. This new 

 movement toward the Japanese art of decoration, which does not 

 aim to copy blindly the Japanese forms, has been observed only 

 within the last fifteen years, or in exceptional cases ten years 

 earlier, and first found expression at the Great Exhibition at 

 Vienna. It was caused by the great popularity of this Japanese 

 decorative art in fashionable circles, and of Japanese products, after 

 the old barriers to their export had fallen. France and England, 

 hitherto the countries which set fashions in industries of all sorts, 

 have also gone the farthest in the new direction. Setting aside 

 the evidence of the Vienna Exhibition, we see the Japanese 

 influence on the industry of these countries, especially in ceramics, 

 decoration of bronzes, gold and silver work (less in other branches 

 of industry), and this was shown especially in the Paris Industrial 

 Exhibition. 



Among the ceramics of the French Exhibition of 1878 there were 

 imitations of Japanese patterns in porcelain and terra cotta, and many 

 especially in Faience. The specimens of Faience from Gien (Loiret), 

 and of Choisy le Roi (Seine), should be mentioned as remarkable 

 productions of this kind. The great manufactory of Gien exhi- 



