Tagged With: Porcelain

Porcelain Rhinoceros

Porcelain Rhinoceros

Porcelain Rhinoceros

We don’t know a lot about this porcelain rhinoceros. In fact, I don’t know for certain that it’s made of porcelain. It’s some sort of ceramic and it’s white, which generally implies kaolin clay and porcelain. It’s glazed mostly green and it has an interesting pattern in the glaze, possibly from the firing technique. It gives the figurine a more natural appearance, because rhinoceroses are not a uniform color (or course, they aren’t green, either, but that’s another matter). There are currently five extant species of rhinoceros, two native to Africa (the white and the black rhino) and three to Asia, the Indian, the Javan, and the Sumatran rhinos. I’m going to go with this being an Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) and guess that the figurine came from central Asia somewhere, but of course it could easily have been bought in the United States.

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Plate of Many Faces

Plate of Many Faces

Plate of Many Faces

We don’t really know much about this plate. It appears to be Japanese, although we don’t actually know where it was produced. We also don’t know how old it is. This is not the whole plate, clearly, but a detail of the center, not quite reaching the edges in the corners of the image. There is a style called “Thousand Faces” and when you search on that, you find a few images that look a bit similar to this but for the most part, that seems to indicate a very particular style (or possibly two styles). Some show many fewer faces than this plate and only perhaps a dozen faces, so I’m not sure where the name comes from. Others fit the name better but not as well as this one, perhaps. On the other hand, this may not be particularly old and doesn’t even qualify as anything in particular. It is nice, though, and I like the fact that most (if not all) of the people depicted are different from one another. In any case, that’s what I have for today.

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