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Vase (one of a pair) for the Spanish market. FOR DETAIL: roll your cursor over the vase for a closeup

CHINESE EXPORT PORCELAIN IN NORTH AMERICA expands the focus of Mudge’s first porcelain book from America to all of North America. It starts with the Portuguese and Spanish in China in the late 16th century, exporting Chinese wares to Mexico. It continues with the Dutch, British and other Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries, who brought Chinese goods to their colonies in the New World. It ends with the American trade with China through the early 20th century. Over 400 illustrations, mostly in color, illustrate the porcelains’ range of Western symbols on an Eastern product, some from private, previously unpublished collections. Collectors, curators, historians, and archaeologists, for whom ceramic shards are “bread crumbs” of past societies, will find important details in the book’s five appendices on marks, gilt porcelains, shipwrecks, archaelogical sites, and western museum collections. An extensive glossary and concordance are also included.
— New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986 (hc); New York: Riverside Book Company, Inc., 2000 (pb)
— ORDER from Amazon.com

Platter with cock.
FOR DETAIL: roll your cursor
over the cock for a closeup.

Goose tureen with closeups

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“This book is by far the best I have ever seen on Chinese export porcelain, and it shows that years of hard and intelligent work went into it. One thing that strikes the eye immediately is the inclusion of so much new material. New forms, new patterns are here in the illustrations to perk up jaded reactions. It is MAGNIFICENT!”
— Charlotte Wilcoxen, Curator of Ceramics, Albany Institute of History and Art

“Your book is invaluable to Mexican collectors who will be interested in everything from the origins to the destination, the shipwrecks, techniques, epochs, shards found in the Mexican excavations, and the superb glossary. The photographs are first-rate, and the designer combined beautifully the coloured ones and the black and white. The ‘formato’ is just the right one: one is so tired of those enormous heavy books than can only be seen on the coffee table.”
— Marita Martinez del Rio de Redo, Art Historian, Mexico City.

“This is a remarkable book, dense and definitely not skimmable, thank heavens.”
— Clare Le Corbeiller, Associate Curator, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.