Blue and White Molded Bottle Vase

These elegant Chinese vases are part of a large gift from the Horowitz Estate in 2007. Blue and white porcelain from China was so highly valued in Europe that in the 17th and 18th centuries, manufacturers and artists began producing “export ware” to feed the lucrative overseas market. Imported porcelain inspired Delft earthenware imitations in Holland and experiments in France and Germany to produce a true porcelain.

During the Victorian period, more than 150 years after the Kangxi era, wealthy collectors in Britain and America avidly accumulated Chinese blue and white plates, vases and bottles. One of the best known collections was that of British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland, which gained fame when James Abbott McNeill Whistler decorated the Peacock Room in his London home as a setting for his porcelains. In the United States, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and even John B. Trevor of Glenview collected Chinese blue and white porcelain. These vases are from the estate of J. P. Morgan.