Rise of Dutch Taste in Decorative Art - Influence of Foreign Trade in the Dutch Home - Accounts of Porcelain by Mediaeval Travellers: Edrisi, Ibn Batuta and Shah Rukh; Quotation from Pigapheta - A great European Collection - Monopoly of Trade by the Portuguese - Quotation from Pyrard de Laval - Portuguese Carracks - Voyages to Goa and Japan - Porcelain and Cabinets - Mendoza's Description of Earthenware - Dutch and English Merchants - Presents to Queen Elizabeth - Dutch Expeditions and Establishment of the Dutch East India Company - Embassy to the Emperor of China in 1655 - Descriptions of the Manufacture of Porcelain - Manufacture and Potters of Delft - Quotation from d'Entrecolles on Porcelain and Oriental Trade - Prices - Tea; Tea-drinking - A Dutch Poet on the Tea-table - Chrestina de Ridder's Porcelain - Prices of Porcelain in 1653.

UNTIL the middle of the seventeenth century, Flanders may be said to have overshadowed Holland in the field of Decorative Art, although, as we have seen, the two most important designers of domestic furniture - De Vries and Crispin van de Passe - were Dutch. The reason of Flemish preponderance was that the sovereigns and regents resided at Mechlin, Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp, and to those courts the ablest men in the arts and crafts naturally flocked. With the decay of Antwerp, we enter the period of the Flemish Decadence, and Amsterdam rises to wealth and power at her rival's expense. After the death of Rubens, Dutch art is supreme in the Low Countries; and Dutch taste undoubtedly influenced France and England.

The Dutch home of the seventeenth century was profoundly affected by foreign trade. The day of heavy carved furniture was over": lightness and brightness are now the prevailing notes. Broad surfaces are veneered and inlaid with exotic woods; and the lathe is freely used in the ornamentation of the supports of seats, cupboards, cabinets, etc. Above all, we notice a predominance of native and Oriental ceramic ware.

The Dutch were as fond of earthenware as of tulips; and no study of a Dutch interior could be adequate if it neglected to take into account the part played by Delft and porcelain.

The three novelties that impressed the Dutch home of the seventeenth century were tea, porcelain and lacquer. The importance of tea, with its table and equipage as a domestic altar, can hardly be overestimated; but its consideration may be deferred for the moment. Porcelain affected the arrangement of furniture and the decoration of rooms. The cabinet assumed new forms and proportions, as porcelain decorated its exterior.

Although Chinese porcelains had appeared in the cabinets of amateurs of the sixteenth century, the comparative rarity of this ware confined its enjoyment to the very wealthy. The magnificent ebony cabinets, armoires, or kasten, with drawers and interior shelves in which women delighted to set in beautiful order miniatures and jewels, enamels and ivories, shells and rock-crystals, medals and coral, now had also to find room for carved ivory and ebony, gods and monsters, jade, porcelain, sandal-wood and lacquer boxes, and all the rarities that were to be found in the stores of the Eastern traders.

Porcelain was early held in high esteem, and a vase was regarded as a fit present from one potentate to another. It was very rare in Western Europe until the Portuguese opened the Eastern gates. Mediaeval travellers had frequently referred to its preciousness. Edrisi (1154) says of Susah: "Here are made an unequalled kind of porcelain, the Ghazar of China." There was always a certain mystery attached to its composition and qualities till the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ibn Batuta, who travelled in Bengal and China about 1350, gives a more or less fabulous account of its manufacture. He says: "Porcelain in China is of about the same value as earthenware with us, or even less. It is exported to India and elsewhere, passing from country to country till it reaches us in Morocco. It is certainly the finest of all pottery ware." In 1420 the Embassy sent by Shah Rukh to the Chinese Court mentions a buffet on which were arranged flagons, cups and goblets of silver and porcelain. The scribe also bears witness to the fact that "in the arts of stone-polishing, cabinet-making, pottery and brick-making, there is nobody with us who can compare with the Chinese."

Early in the sixteenth century, before 1520, A. Piga-pheta made a voyage to the East. He describes a visit to the house of the Queen of Mindanao: "I sat down by the side of her; she was weaving a palm mat to sleep upon. Throughout her house was seen porcelain vases suspended to the walls and four metal timbals." He tells us that in Borneo, at Bruni: "For one cathil (a weight equal to two of our pounds) of quicksilver they gave us six porcelain dishes; for a cathil of metal they gave one small porcelain vase, and a large vase for three knives. . . . The merchandise which is most esteemed here is bronze, quicksilver, cinnabar, glass, woollen stuffs, linens; but above all they esteem iron and spectacles.

"Since I saw such use made of porcelain I got some information respecting it, and I learned that it is made with a kind of very white earth, which is left underground for fully fifty years to refine it, so that they are in the habit of saying that a father buries it for his son. It is said that if poison is put into a vessel of fine porcelain it breaks immediately."

It is generally supposed that the table service, even among the rich, was very limited during the sixteenth century. A careful search of the inventories, however, shows that a complete service of faience was to be found on the tables of the opulent in the first half of the sixteenth century. In 1532, we find that the widow of a minister of Francis I had two complete services of beautiful faience: one entirely white, and the other "his-toried" with all kinds of coloured portraits. These two services were composed each of four dozen large and three dozen small plates, four aiguieres, three round and one oval basin, three salts (sallieres), eight pots, twelve tazzi, and three dozen spoons, some of ivory and some of wood and mother-of-pearl, "which we used in summer and autumn in serving collations of confitures, junkets, custards, syllabubs, fruits and cider to the great ladies who came to visit my daughters and myself; and in addition I have also many other vessels of the best pottery of Italy, Germany, Flanders, England and Spain."