A great deal of the Copeland jewelled ware is exceedingly beautiful. We have chosen one specimen as being exceptional, both in its design and decoration (Fig. 353), and it would certainly be difficult to lavish upon it too much praise. The base is gilt, the body is of two shades of blue, and the gracefully expanding neck pale brown dotted with brown of a darker{385} tint. The handles consist of golden butterflies resplendent with jewels. The effect is rich, but harmonious and charming, and the piece may be regarded as one of the most favorable illustrations of what the English artists of our time can accomplish.

In approaching the Copeland parian (Figs. 354 and 355), we find ourselves among some of the finest works in that material yet given to the world. An enumeration of the artists regularly or specially engaged in this department would include many of the highest names in the profession. This branch of art has developed rapidly, partly on account of the rivalry between manufacturers, but chiefly by reason of the welcome everywhere extended to the works issued. Among the subjects chosen by the Copelands, many, possibly the greater number, are ideals—such personifications as those of Music and Poetry. It could not be expected that all these would be of equal merit, and fault may occasionally be found with attitudes and proportions; but they are, as a whole, admirably executed.

Yet another branch of art in which the Copelands have been eminently successful is represented by the perforated or reticulated ware of which the Chinese supply the types. The potting difficulties and risk in making this double surface ware are greater or less according to the intricacy and delicacy of the perforations. In the cup and saucer here given (Fig. 356) the manipulation and firing were exceptionally delicate and hazardous, far more so than in{386} the case of the honey-comb perforation. Held up to the light, the inner surface appears to be as thin as egg-shell; and it seems a perfect marvel that, when the heat has softened the body, the upper surface does not sink down upon that below. Where plugs can be used to keep them apart, or where the perforated surface is strongly arched, or where the article can be placed upright, the danger is manifestly less than in such a piece as the saucer, with its pointed leaf-work bending downward rather than arching. It is also necessarily placed flat in the kiln. Many pieces of the same kind have been made by the Copelands.

We have already seen that Cookworthy sold his patent to Mr. R. Champion, of Bristol. It appears, however, that he retained an interest in it after Champion started his manufactory in that city until the year 1773, when he relinquished his right on payment of a royalty. The Bristol workshop was founded a few years previously, but no natural porcelain was put upon the market until that date. The fact that Champion was, in 1776, making artificial porcelain indicates that he very soon found his hard porcelain venture would not be remunerative. He was, according to one authority, associated with a company of Bristol gentlemen in his enterprise, and it appears to be certain that when he applied for the extension of his patent he did not stand alone. In 1781 or 1782 he resigned his right to a company of Staffordshire potters, and was appointed Paymaster of the Forces, under his friend Mr. Edmund Burke. He died in 1787, at Camden, South Carolina. The Bristol china is chiefly valuable by reason of its rarity. The decoration is after Continental and Chinese styles, and the paste is inferior.

The company which purchased Champion’s patent continued to make natural paste until 1810, first at Tunstall and afterward at Shelton. It was called “New Hall china.” Artificial porcelain was made until 1825.

When, in 1807, the Bramelds acquired the Swinton works, they conjoined the manufacture of Rockingham and fine pottery with porcelain of excellent quality. They endeavored to make a ware of the finest sort in both body and decoration, but fell into financial difficulties in 1826, and, although assisted by Earl Fitzwilliam, finally succumbed, as we have already seen, in 1842.{387}

Caughley is the earliest and most important of the Shropshire porcelains. The workshop would be deserving of remembrance were it only for one reason—that it was here Mr. Thomas Turner originated, in 1780, the willow pattern. The manufacture of porcelain at Caughley was inaugurated soon after the middle of the eighteenth century. Turner took the management about 1780, although he had been interested in the works for some years previously. He effected great improvements, introduced printing, raised the quality of the ware, and engaged the most skilful decorators. He also made white ware for other decorating establishments, especially those of Worcester. The Caughley works were, in 1799, amalgamated with those of Colebrookdale.

A factory was founded at Nantgarrow in 1813, by Walker & Beely, or Billingsley, and was carried on, in conjunction with Mr. W. Young, until 1828, when it was bought by Mr. John Rose, of Colebrookdale.

The “Cambrian Pottery” of Swansea was founded in 1750, and began to make “opaque china” in 1790, and from 1814 to 1819 was making porcelain. Young and Billingsley, the Nantgarrow artists, both appear to have been employed at Swansea, by Mr. Dillwyn, who had bought the works in 1802. In 1820 they passed into the possession of Mr. Rose, of Colebrookdale.

At this place, or Coalport, as it is alternatively called, the Caughley, Nantgarrow, and Swansea factories were thus consolidated in the hands of Mr. John Rose, a pupil of Turner of Caughley, and a man of great enterprise. He took with him the best artists of the works successively absorbed, and it is here that we again meet Walker and Billingsley as superintendents. The present proprietor is Mr. W. F. Rose. The Messrs. Daniell, of London, are among the leading supporters of the factory, and have incited Mr. Rose to some of his most successful experiments in color. Of these the Dubarry rose, one of the most famous and beautiful colors of Sèvres, is probably the most important.

Billingsley worked first at Derby, then successively at Pinxton, Mansfield, Worcester, Nantgarrow, Swansea, and Coalport. He died at the last mentioned place in 1828.

The Pinxton factory here mentioned was established in 1795, by Mr. John Coke, who transferred it to Billingsley, from whom it passed to Mr. Cutts. It was closed in 1812.{388}

Brief mention has already been made of Tunstall and Shelton. The latter place is less known in America, in connection with the working of the Champion patent, than by the names of Ridgway and Brown, Westhead, Moore & Co. (Fig. 357). Job Ridgway was a Shelton potter in the latter part of the last century, and was, in 1814, succeeded by his sons John and William, who were followed by the above firm. The porcelain of both firms is well known in this country. With Shelton, although there are or have been many other factories in England, we close our sketch of that country.

A peculiar ware from Belleek, Lough Erne, Fermanagh County, Ireland, has made its appearance in America within the past ten years, and has been received with considerable favor both here and in Canada. It is carefully and artistically wrought into ornamental pieces and services. Its chief peculiarity is an iridescent glaze of a silvery, lustrous appearance. In the specimen (Fig. 358) the pedestal is unglazed, and its dead white contrasts admirably with the lustrous flowers, base, and top. The ware is obtained from a combination of clays found in the neighborhood from which it takes its name. It is a true porcelain and very translucent, and in thin lustred pieces rivals the egg-shell of the far East. It is equally beautiful in biscuit or glazed.{389}

Several original designs appear among the table services of this ware, which are rendered very attractive by the peculiar glaze. Exceedingly beautiful imitations of shells (Fig. 359) are made of Belleek ware, a purpose for which it is especially suited by reason of the similarity the glazed surface presents to the inside pearly lining of a shell (Fig. 360). A ware somewhat similar in appearance is made in England and France, where an artificial metallic glaze is employed to produce the madreperla lustre.

enlarge-image
Fig. 360.—Belleek Porcelain. (Tiffany & Co.)
Fig. 360.—Belleek Porcelain. (Tiffany & Co.)

The ceramics of England are of special interest to the American reader. In many of our old homes are to be found samples of English pottery and porcelain brought to this country long before Revolutionary{390} times. Many of them are, like heirlooms, passed on from generation to generation, the remnants being all the more highly prized as they become fewer in number. A great deal of the earthen-ware and porcelain used here within the last century has come from the centres of which we have been treating. To the student of the art, also, England has an interest all its own. The workmen of England have, from the earliest times, shown that moral as well as mental capacity for coping with mechanical and scientific difficulties which marks the typical English character. Wedgwood was a remarkable instance of a man who, with materials usually considered of inferior quality for artistic embellishment, steadily aimed at producing works which should be, and actually were, the best of their kind. So it is with the Mintons and Doultons of our day. They surround themselves with the best artists they can find, and have taught England, which was still disposed to reserve its warmest admiration for works executed in the long-coveted and only recently possessed porcelain, to forget the medium in the art it conveys.{391}

enlarge-image
Fig. 361.—Tile-piece, by F. T. Vance.
Fig. 361.—Tile-piece, by F. T. Vance.

BOOK IV.—AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

SOUTH AMERICA.

THE ceramics of America bring us into a field hitherto unexplored, and showing few footprints of the investigators who have been led to its borders. We are here confronted by a state of things to which we have hitherto been strangers. As creatures belonging to the New World we have been taught to look with a respect in which America has no share upon the aged civilizations of Egypt, Assyria, and China. Their ancient inhabitants were the patriarchs of the world, the pioneers of civilization; we are the latter-day heirs to the arts and sciences of which they laid the foundations. The present citizens of those lands are the children of æons, we the mushroom growth of centuries. Research has already partially succeeded in endowing America with so much of the venerable as can be conferred by age. Such notions as those above referred to are being rapidly dissipated. We have long known that the hemisphere we inhabit was styled new, not because its geological formation is of later growth than those of{392} the Old World, nor because its inhabitants are the after-math of the world’s population, but because five hundred years ago it was new to the navigators of the East. We now know that, from Lake Superior to Peru and Chili we can traverse the sites of old settlements and find the vestiges of peoples who lived we cannot tell how many hundred or thousand years ago. In the history of ceramic art America in no way differs from Europe or Asia. We can begin with the sun-dried bricks of the Peruvians, or Mound-builders, and end with the porcelain of Greenpoint. As Europe loosed its hold upon the earlier arts of Greece and Rome, was dismembered, and was for centuries plunged in darkness by the incursions and dispersal of barbarians, and then, as it revived, developed a new artistic sense and greater strength, so America passed through a precisely similar ordeal.

Two thousand years ago—possibly many more—art and civilization existed here, and continued to expand until Europeans came and checked their farther growth. America is not even singular in this, that a broad chasm divides the old from the new.

There are thus two great periods which we shall be called upon to consider. There is, first, the ancient, when the aboriginal people were building curious and wonderful monuments of their presence, and modelling the quaint vessels now found in our museums. There is, then, the second period, limited to little more than half a century, in which art wears a modern guise, when the products of American potteries become a recognized item in the industry of the country, and the manufacture is substantially founded upon a broad commercial basis. Our inquiry will not, therefore, be entirely confined to a recent past and a present chiefly remarkable for the promise that it contains. We shall, in a hasty review, turn back across the centuries intervening between the present time and the advent of Europeans with Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro, across the barbarism of the Indian period, across even the earlier times, when the Aztecs in the North, and the Peruvians under the Incas in the South, were cultivating their peculiar forms of civilization, to a more remote past occupied by those elder children of Time, to whose heritage these peoples appear to have succeeded. Afterward will come the indulgence of the characteristic tendency of the nineteenth-century American, who is more addicted to looking to the future than to the past. In the mean time, we must{393} try to accustom ourselves to the fact that, for the purposes of a continuous history, the potters of our own time are the successors of those who deposited their urns in the mounds of the Mississippi valley and in the tombs of Peru.

It will probably be both the only historically consequent and the most lucid method to treat the different countries from south to north. We begin with Peru. We need not go into the theories, mostly fanciful, by which an origin and genealogy are found for the ancient inhabitants of America. We cannot even undertake to solve the question whether the New World may not be the Old.

enlarge-image
Fig. 362.—Peruvian Water-vessels.
Fig. 362.—Peruvian Water-vessels.

The evidence in support of America’s having been the resting-place of the lost tribes of Israel, of its having been visited from the Pacific by Malays, from the Atlantic by Phœnicians, of the truth of the old legend of Atlantis, a land which lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is in great part composed of inferences from assumptions. Reason would point to Behring Strait as the point at which the first inhabitants entered, but even that supposition may account for nothing more remote than the arrival of the Indians of North America. Or, to find a genealogy for the same people, we might adopt Mr. Griffis’s very plausible theory of a Japanese descent, based upon the fact that “for twenty centuries past Japanese fishing-boats and junks, caught in the easterly gales and typhoons, have been swept into the Kuro Shiwo, and carried to America.” It is more pertinent to our purpose to find that, amidst a civilization which bears a stamp of originality, ceramic art followed the course it had taken in Europe, Africa, and{394} Asia. Similarity in forms, even in symbols, may argue nothing more than a mysterious identity in the workings of humanity toward artistic and religious expression. They cannot, without other evidence, be held to prove an identity of origin. This preliminary observation is made that we may not fall into the baseless theorizing which is the bane of science. External resemblances have, before this day, sadly misled scientists, with whom possibilities have become probabilities, and probabilities have unconsciously passed into assumed facts.

Let us take the parallel supplied by the search for the primitive tongue before language became the subject-matter of a science. For centuries the idea was entertained that the honor of priority was to be accorded to the Hebrew. In the sixteenth century Goropius, of Antwerp, proved, beyond a peradventure, that the language of Paradise was Dutch. Erro advocated the claims of Basque; and about a century after Goropius had settled the question, it was gravely recorded in the minutes of the Chapter of Pampeluna, that, though it could not be asserted with confidence that Basque was the primitive language of mankind, yet “it was impossible to bring forward any reasons or rational objection to this proposition, that it was the only language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise.” Assume the positive, and leave it to objectors to prove the negative! Science came afterward, and found that not fanciful verbal resemblances, but similarity of grammatical construction, was the test of radical affinity, and all the above fine theories were exploded. The rule will hold good with pottery. If two potters at two places far remote from each other, possibly as far removed in point of time, should produce similar forms, it would be rash at once to conclude that they were inspired by the same idea or followed the same model. The adoption of such a course would amount to a resuscitation of the extinct philological rule of comparing the words in different tongues to demonstrate relationship. We shall find a point for this caution as we proceed.

When Peruvian civilization began we have no means of ascertaining. Repeated changes have swept over it. It rose and fell, and rose and fell again, at epochs only partly within our ken. Of the overwhelming antiquity claimed for it some of the facts brought together by Mr. J. D. Baldwin may give an idea. Montesinos, a Spaniard, who believed Peru to be the Ophir of Solomon, dates its ancient history{395} from the year B.C. 2500. His first period extends down to the first or second century of our era, when the ancient kingdom was broken up into fragments, and shorn of its earlier glory. Then came a long interval of confusion, strife, and internecine struggle, which ended with the advent of Inca-Rocca, the first of the Incas. The Incas had extended their sway over the old limits of Peru, when Pizarro came, in 1531, and with his Spanish followers swept everything back into chaos. A greedy lust for gold was the sole impulse of the treacherous and brutal invaders. Perfectly dead to every sense of honor, stained with the reddest hues of crime, too rapacious to withhold their hands from the commission of any brutality, too crassly ignorant to care for knowledge, the Spanish buccaneers turned Peruvian progress back in its course, and struck such a blow at the vitality of the country that it has never recovered.

It will at once be thought that B.C. 2500 is a very remote date at which to begin the history of a country in the New World, but let us see what countenance science lends to such a chronology. Professor Orton says: “Geology and archæology are combining to prove that Sorata and Chimborazo have looked down upon a civilization far more ancient than that of the Incas, and perhaps coeval with the flint flakes of Cornwall and the shell mounds of Denmark. On the shores of Lake Titicaca are extensive ruins which antedate the advent of Manco Capac (the second of Montesinos’ oldest dynasty of kings), and may be as venerable as the lake-dwellings of Geneva.” Mr. James S. Wilson, in 1860, found “ancient, or fossil, pottery” on the coast of Ecuador. To help in assigning it an age, the fact is all-important that it was found below a marine deposit several feet in thickness. This pottery, then, was made; the land was submerged at a rate almost incalculably slow; it was covered with a marine deposit; the land was then upheaved to its former level, again at a very slow rate, and seventeen years ago, the pottery came to light, like a fossil taken from the rocks, to tell us that at an age so remote that it is hard even for imagination to reach it, the Peruvians were accustomed to working in clay. Compared with this people the Incas are creatures of yesterday, and the earliest date of Montesinos is hardly mediæval. The difficulty is to assign an exact, or even an approximate, date to the ceramic remains we possess. Many of them belong to an era preceding{396} that of the Incas, but no more precise language can be employed in specifying their age. The conditions, moreover, are such that an erroneous deduction might easily be made. The great road from Quito to Chili, for instance, is built chiefly of stone. The same material was used for the inns along its course, and for many other buildings. This road must, at least in part, be ascribed to a period anterior to that of the Incas. At a later date, when the least ancient part of Pachacamac, the ruined city of the Incas, near Lima, was built, sun-dried bricks appear as the chief building material. Pachacamac was originally built by the natives of the coast, and among its ruins are those of one of their temples, composed of adobes painted red. The Inca Mamacuna on the same site is composed of the same material. This is a reversal of previous experience. We have hitherto associated unbaked bricks with the earliest attempts of the potter. If we argue from Asiatic or European usage, the most ancient Peruvians would appear as primitive settlers ignorant of art, which we have already seen they were not.

The best articles of pottery have been taken from the tombs. The connection of moulded clay with the burial of the dead was thus universal. We have seen the Egyptian mummy surrounded by vases and jars, urns holding or covering the ashes of the ancient British dead, the hut-shaped urn of the Teuton, the remains of the Roman legionary deposited in an olla covered by tiles or bricks, and the tuguria of Etruria; and here, in Peru, is a precisely similar custom regulating the burial rite.

At Pachacamac Mr. Squier found three strata of mummies. Most of these were taken from little vaults of adobes, roofed with sticks and rushes. In one of them he found, lying beside the dead family, the implements of the husband’s business as fisherman, the wife’s domestic articles, including a primitive spindle, a girl’s work-box under her body, small contrivances of hollowed bone for cosmetics, and between her feet the dried body of a pet parrot. An infant’s body had a rattle beside it. “Besides the bodies there were a number of utensils, and other articles in the vault; among them half a dozen earthen jars, pans, and pots of various sizes and ordinary form (Fig. 363). One or two were still incrusted with the soot of the fires over which they had been used. Every one contained something. One was filled with{397} ground-nuts, familiar to us as peanuts; another with maize, etc., all except the latter in a carbonized state.” Probably the nuts and maize were deposited for the use of the deceased in the future, and the supposition helps to increase the illusion that we are away from Peru, and back among the graves of Ancient Egypt. To this superstition, common, as we have seen, to nearly all peoples, we are therefore indebted, not only for our knowledge of Peruvian pottery, but for much of our information regarding the people themselves. No other place could have equalled the grave in safety for the preservation of the records which have been passed from its secrecy into our hands. The imaginary wants of a future state led the poor and the Inca to be laid in their respective vaults with the articles they had used here, and which they were supposed to stand in equal need of hereafter. “Every Inca,” says Mr. Ewbank, “had his cooking utensils in his cemetery; not only his gold and silver ware, but, observes the native historian, ‘the plates and dishes of his kitchen.’” The favorable conditions of soil and climate under which they were interred increase the difficulty of telling their age by examination merely. They might from their appearance have been buried for generations or for ages. It is, however, evident, from the character of the deposits and the assumed wants they anticipated—corn, cooking-vessels, toys, pets, fishing-lines, spindles—that the Peruvians shared the belief held by Christians, that here they were strangers and sojourners. They prepared for the next life by taking all their movables with them, as if merely changing their place of abode.

The tombs being thus the great receptacles of Peruvian antiquities, what do we find to be the general character of the art represented in the pottery? The same that is found in the architecture or statuary of the country, viz., the greatest possible disparity in both design and workmanship. On one hand are creations of art, the conception of an artist carried out by an artist’s hand; on the other are the{398} most outrageous concessions to an idolatrous barbarism. In a similar manner, earthen-ware vessels of diametrically opposite types are found side by side in the same tomb. To perplex us still farther, French writers have advanced the theory that for a very long period art in South America gradually but surely declined. They state that from a primitive simplicity and purity of style it sank step by step into barbarism.

This may or may not be true, but in any case the two sets of facts may be thus explained. We have seen that in Egypt religion set a limit to art. Practically the matter resolved itself into this, that the potter-artist could rise above neither the god he worshipped nor the sacred symbol he revered. Priestcraft is necessarily conservative. Change and improvement involve a departure from the old, and the ancient gods might be left behind and their shrines deserted, were art to rise above the delineation of the artistic abominations which were encased in sacred tradition as the symbols of deity. The image cannot change any more than the god. In Egypt nearly every form of life—bird, beast, and plant—was monopolized by its religious system and petrified into a traditional form. It is possible that a similar influence was at work in Peru. The rude forms may really have been what we have styled them, “concessions to an idolatrous barbarism.”

It is necessary in the case of Peru, as in that of China or Egypt, to make an attempt to discover the essentials of its religion, that we may understand its ceramic art. With Peru, however, we must in part work backward, by first constructing a system from what we find upon pottery. Mr. Squier gives much valuable information on this point. “To them,” he says, referring to the sacred vessels of pottery devoted to religious and mortuary services, “in default of other probable or possible means of recording a religious symbolism, we must look for all the scanty illustrations we are ever likely to obtain of the religious ideas and conceptions of their makers.” Pachacamac took its name from the chief divinity of the people prior to the coming of the Incas, and means, “He who animates the universe,” “The creator of the world.” The idea of a supreme being may thus be inferred to have been the foundation of a system which, like many other ancient religions, resorted to symbols, and thence by an easy transition assumed in popular practice the form of idolatry. We thus{399} find that when the Inca Yupanqui invaded the Chimus, he called upon them to renounce their worship of fishes and animals, and turn to that of the sun. There is no reason for believing that the creed of the Incas was superior to that of the Chimus. It appears rather that, in broadly condemning that people for their worship of animals, the Inca mistook the use of symbols for the adoration of the animals so used. Our researches in Egypt and elsewhere would lead us to the conclusion that if the worship of animals existed anywhere, it resulted from a misapprehension by the ignorant of the purpose of symbolizing by living things the attributes of a higher power. As in Egypt, so in Peru the religion may be said to have been dual. On the one hand is the worship of a supreme power, and the personification of visible agencies in air, earth, and water. On the other is a lower form, an idolatry bordering upon fetichism. Under the higher form water is personified, and the god thus constructed is accompanied by befitting symbols of his domain—the turtle, fish, or crab; the earth is personified, and has as symbols the serpent and lizard; the air is also personified, and the figure carries in his hand a spear, as representing the thunder-bolt, his symbol. Mr. Squier gives an engraving of a design upon a Chimu vase, in which the powers of earth and sea are arrayed in combat. The latter is armed with the claws and shell of a crab, hence assumed to be his symbol. The former bears on his front a serpent’s head, wields a horned serpent in one hand, and has two similarly horned reptiles hanging at his back: hence the serpent is accepted as his symbol. Probably coeval with a form of belief which sought such expression, was another under which images were resorted to, and set up as the recipients of the worship originally directed to a higher power. It is not impossible that the worship of a supreme being, and of his attributes and symbols, may have been coexistent among the same people. On the contrary, such actually appears to have been the case; and if the highest form of belief existed along with the lowest form of expression, it is not hard, as already pointed out, to find a reason for the coexistence of the highest and lowest forms of art.

As to the French theory of a long-continued decline of Peruvian art, if we assume its truth, it may be explained in the light of Peruvian history. The supposition has reference, apparently, to the earliest{400} Peruvian elevation, prior to the dismemberment of the empire. Before the coming of the Incas art must have suffered from the civil discord, and under the Incas its recovery was probably hindered by the wars which extended down to the Spanish conquest. After Pizarro—a second death.

Let us now examine some of the forms of Peruvian pottery. It would be impossible to classify or enumerate them all. Nature and religion contributed decorations and forms. The beings of earth, sea, and air—men, fishes (Fig. 364), animals, and plants (Fig. 365)—were modelled in clay, and decorations were drawn from the same sources and from the customs of the people. The only classification of a comprehensive character is that into coast and inland. The former of these divisions comprises the greater part of the specimens now existing, including, of course, all from Pachacamac, Huacho, Santa, and Truxillo, or Chimu. The latter includes all that comes from Cuzco (Fig. 367) and other places in the interior.

Visitors to the Centennial Exhibition may remember to have seen a large array of vases and household utensils sent from Lima. In the collection of Mr. W. B. Colville were several clay idols, belonging to the period before the advent of the Incas. Some of these were wrapped in cloth, and none possessed any claims to artistic finish or design. A similar image was exhibited by Brown University, in the Rhode Island section. All were mere caricatures of the human form. Along with them, in the space allotted to Lima, were several hundreds of quaintly shaped water-vessels and bottles. In some of these were to be found those compound typical forms distinctively American. In others appeared forms which at once recalled the Egyptian. Of the latter the most remarkable were{401} the double or twin bottles joined together by bands at the neck and base, after a fashion observed in Egypt and also in Mexico. It is unnecessary to conclude from this fact that Egypt had an ancient connection with Peru. Sometimes on one of the bottles a head was placed as a cover to the orifice, others had both necks plain and open.

The more characteristic forms belonged to the class comprising the water-vessels. Of these the favorite form appeared to be what might be described as a pot-bellied graybeard ornamented with a rude semblance of the human face, hands, and feet. It was made of all sizes. Another might be taken as the prototype of the modern round-bodied glass water-bottle, or carafe. A third had the arched syphon handle characteristic of an entire class; and on the body, under the span of the arch, was the figure of an animal, too rudely modelled for us to give it a name. On a small proportion of those mentioned weak and undecided colors were applied in a primitive style of decoration, and in others the ornamentation consisted of lines and dots or studs.

enlarge-image
Fig. 367.—Vases from Cuzco.
Fig. 367.—Vases from Cuzco.

{402}

The Peruvian potters bestowed a large share of their inventive talent upon water-vessels, and the reason is not difficult to find. According to its present limits, Peru extends from the third to the twenty-first degree south latitude. In the sixteenth century it included the entire territory now divided into Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Chili. The country in which its remains are found extended over two thousand miles south of the equator. In some parts of this vast territory rain occasionally falls, in others never. In this fact we see the necessity for ample means of slaking thirst. The quaint forms are largely due to the dread of small creeping animals finding their way into the jars or flagons. The latter were, therefore, made in the comparatively intricate shapes already described, and in others still more complex and more highly ornamental.

The largest class comprises those with the bifurcate spout, which serves at the same time for a handle. This is found attached to vessels of every conceivable form. The simplest shape is that seen in the specimen from the Smithsonian Institution (Fig. 368), the body of which, however, is somewhat peculiar, by reason of its rising from the base in a coil of spiral folds. Several modifications of this style are seen in the engraving (Fig. 369). The presence of this spout in any of its forms is of special interest as distinctive of pottery from the coast settlements. Its modifications include a vast number of interesting examples more or less artistic. From the single vessel with bifurcate spout we may pass to others in which there are two openings joined together by a handle. Higher than these are the vases, in which, with only one orifice, the body is double.

enlarge-image
Fig. 369.—Ancient Peruvian Pottery.
Fig. 369.—Ancient Peruvian Pottery.

enlarge-image
Fig. 370.—Peruvian Pottery.
Fig. 370.—Peruvian Pottery.

In one the receptacle for the water consists of a series of four chambers, with pointed bases arranged in a circle, and joined together (Fig. 370). The handle is the arch, with spout on the top. In some the vessel assumes the form of a fish, with a handle on the ridge of{403} the back, or of an animal with semi-human face. The twin shape is exceedingly varied. A very fine specimen has the bottles with round, flattened bodies, and one of them surmounted by a diminutive human figure holding a cross on the right shoulder, while from the left the handle crosses to the tall, slightly tapering neck of the twin bottle. The flat sides of the bottles are decorated with studs and zigzags, which might be construed into serpentine forms. A bird sitting in the cavity of one neck sometimes takes the place of the heads already alluded to. In some of the double bottles the communication is through the handle. In others it is effected by joining the bodies together, as in the curious specimen (Fig. 371), in which the rudely modelled kneeling figure of a man eating and drinking is joined to{404} the twin compartment at the back by the passage-way between the two sections. There are many other varieties; but the most remarkable specimens are those in which an attempt is made to simulate the human head and form. The former is carved in coarse lines covering the entire expanse of a heavily formed vase, the handles of which, low down on the body, represent the ears. Even lower than this, and parallel with the most primitive bessa of Egypt, are other wide-mouthed jars of a type altogether different, designed to serve a purpose entirely distinct from those last considered. From these as a base we can rise to what we must regard as the chefs-d'œuvre of ancient American art.

It is curious to observe, en passant, a similarity of usage between Peru and Greece (Figs. 372 and 373) in selecting the human head as the model of a drinking-cup; but let us observe the Peruvian type. In one (Fig. 373) the head is thrown back, and from the forehead to the crown passes the syphon handle. To balance this backward weight the face is thrust forward, and the expression is affected by the position. We see that the artist has made allowance for this in the lines round the mouth and the slightly parted lips. A faint suspicion of weakness is thus left upon the countenance. Taking it in profile, one almost wonders where the artist found a model for the large but well-formed nose and{405} strong underjaw. Even finer is another head (Fig. 374), covered with a close-fitting cap falling in heavy flaps behind. In this the face is, we would say, of the best Saxon type, full of strength, vigor, and determination. Not a weak line can be found. With it before us, all wonder as to the civilization of ancient Peru is at an end. Apart altogether from the workmanship, there are moral qualities traceable in the model which convince us that with such men civilization was a condition of life; not a labor, but a necessity. The face wears the placid, self-confident, powerful expression of one born to be a ruler of men. That the artist has caught such a look of strength in repose may imply either his mastery of portraiture or his familiarity with a high type of manhood.