History of Porcelain Painting

History of China Painting

The art of china painting, referenced in many works as porcelain art or china decoration, has its roots in the history of early China.

It is documented that cave dwellers in Turkey as early as 7000 BC began making bowls, jugs, and utensils out of clay. Egyptians built ovens to harden their clay pieces in 5000 BC. However, over glazing was not discovered until around 3000 BC and decoration of the clay ware came much later. It wasn’t until the T’ang Dynasty in 618 AD that the Chinese began making what is known today as hard porcelain. They discovered that combinations of kaolin clay and feldspar resulted in the most beautiful ceramics.

This porcelain ware is distinguished from other ceramics by possessing excellent qualities of hardness, translucency, and whiteness of body or paste. Any ceramic piece that possesses all of these qualities may be classified as porcelain, and, from a practical point of view, the more it excels under these characteristics, the better the specimen of porcelain it is. The Chinese, being supreme secret keepers, remained the masters and sole producers of hard-bodied porcelain until the middle of the 1700s.