18th Century Chinese Export Porcelain | Kentucky Collectibles

Thank you so much for bringing this bowl in today. When you brought it in, I was ecstatic. It's not every day, especially in Kentucky, you don't expect to see a lot of 18th century high style porcelains. What can you tell me about it? Well, it actually belongs to a very dear friend of mine. They actually had it sitting on top of their TV and we were looking at it one evening and decided it was something that was worth looking into a little deeper. We know that it's very old and has some kind of Asian-esque art on it, but it's a obviously Scottish piece, and so we thought we would find out a little bit more. Well, what you brought into us is a very rare piece of what we call Chinese export porcelain. Okay. And in the 18th and well, really starting in the 15th and 16th century, Europeans finally get access to China and they're so ecstatic to finally see all these new wonderful things that they've not been exposed to. One of the first things that they looked at was this porcelain. In Europe, they didn't have the ability to get really white looking porcelains. All their materials were grayish or had a tinted hue. And what happened was in China, they had the ability to combine what basically is called China clay and China stone and form porcelain, which has this kind of glass-like and very white effect. So once trade routes began to open up into China, we see a lot of European merchants getting goods and they want their European images on this high style porcelain. And what we have here is the Scottish coat of arms. And that was incredibly rare. It's actually known as the Order of the Thistle. And this would have been used during the George II and George III period. So about 1750 to about 1765-70, right in that range. And it's really fascinating because not only do you see the Scottish coat of arms, you also see these wonderful European scenes here. But what's happening is you have a person basically taking a print and sending it to China. And the Chinese artisans would take time to basically paint the decoration onto these bowls and eventually move them, send them back to Europe. So what we would think of is this process would typically take several years to send the print over to China and then wait to be executed and then brought back. Only the wealthiest Europeans and Americans were doing this at the time. And we're very fortunate to see this example because in order to use the Order of the Thistle, you had to be a pretty special family, either royalty or definitely some connection to the royal family. And, you know, I will point out this piece has had a little bit of restoration. It's hard to tell, but if you look around the edge, there's just some little minor, it looks like almost touch up paint. And what that means is it's been restored, which is acceptable considering that this pot is so thin and transferred all the way from China to Europe and now to Kentucky. It affects the value a little bit. A conservative estimate on this piece in a retail setting would be $25,000 to $35,000. Really? Absolutely. So it's such a treat to see this especially coming into Kentucky. Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing it in.