A PAIR OF FAMILLE ROSE DOUBLE-WALLED RETICULATED HEXAGONAL BALUSTER VASES Qianlong period, circa 1760 Of hexagonal shape with double walls, the outer walls reticulated with Buddhist wan (long-life) symbols to the main panels and centered by landscape roundels in grisaille and pale enamels, the shoulder with smaller panels with a reticulated honycomb pattern with famille rose landscape roundels, the tall trumpet neck with a reticulated trellis cell pattern with leaf-shaped panels painted with chrysanthemums, the borders with colorful cell grounds, the spreading foot with ogival panels of ribboned objects and scholar's items on a pink and blue lotus ground. 20 1/2in (52cm) high (2). Footnotes: 乾隆時期 約1760年 粉彩玲瓏帶膽開光六方敞口瓶一對 Published Cohen & Cohen, Baroque & Roll, Antwerp, 2015, p. 71, no. 46 出版： 倫敦Cohen & Cohen古董行，《Baroque & Roll》，安特衛普，2015年，頁71，圖版編號46 Westerners were fascinated by the technical skills that Chinese potters exhibited in the first half of the 18th century when huge quantities of standard Chinese porcelain were reaching Europe every year on East India Company merchantmen. Most European porcelain manufacturers and designers were still exploring and inventing novel ceramic techniques, rather than treating porcelain production, as the Chinese had done for three centuries, as a very large commercial enterprise, producing millions of pieces of porcelain every year when the climate was suitable in Jiangxi Province for handling the sensitive clay which needed warmth, a cool dry climate and running water to make it workable and sufficiently plastic, while dried sufficiently not to collapse while being fired in the kiln. One product they had admired for a century before these vases were made, were the wares very cleverly pierced through the porcelain body with an elaborate 'reticulated' pattern, almost as if treating the very fragile body as lace; or else piercing them through an outer skin to leave the external filigree porcelain surface partially concealing decoration painted onto on a flat inner surface. The Dutch imported this type of technologically remarkable (blue and white) bowls in the mid-17th century, but they were so apparently complicated if not impossible that the Dutch called these small, pierced bowls 'Devil work'. Despite this evidence of remarkable potting skill by the Chinese in the mid 17th century, the VOC records at the time are full of complaints about the poor quality of the porcelain they were receiving from the Chinese merchants who traveled at this earlier period between Jingdezhen and the Dutch trading station in Taiwan with their annual porcelain orders. References: Cohen & Cohen, 2007, p. 11, no. 7, a pair of reticulated vases of different shape; Wirgin, 1998, pp. 106-110, a single vase; C sheaf and R. Kilburn, The Hatcher Porcelain Cargoes, p. 71, pl. 110.