Tea at the Getty : Two Museum Paintings Hold Interest for Collectors of Fine China

Billionaire J. Paul Getty made fine collections of classical antiquities and of 18th-Century French furniture; but it is generally accepted that he was not so hot in the picture-buying department. Maybe he had a better eye for three dimensions than for two.

After Getty left most of his fortune to his museum in Malibu, the museum set itself to remedy the picture collection’s deficiencies. Two of the works it acquired in the early 1980s were by Swiss artist Jean-Etienne Liotard--not, perhaps, a name to conjure with, though it should be. One is a pastel of an alert-eyed 7-year-old girl, Maria Fredericke van Reede-Athlone, wearing an ermine-trimmed coat. The other is an oil painting, a still life (right) of a tea set, painted about 1783, more than 20 years after the pastel was executed.

Liotard was what is today called a “super-realist.” As the handbook of the Getty Museum collections points out, he “painted children and tea sets in a like manner. He set his subjects against plain backgrounds and then recorded their appearances as faithfully as possible.” In the pastel portrait, the small girl’s expression suggests that a meal might be about to begin. In the still life, it is clear that a meal has just been finished. Some pretty sloppy people have been taking tea. Cups are askew or upside-down; a slice of bread is half on a plate, half off.

The Getty still life has interest for the china collector, not just the paintings connoisseur. The cups of the Chinese tea set depicted have no handles; they are tea bowls, in fact. As late as 1783, people were burning their fingers on handle-less cups. This was not because cups with handles were unknown. In fact, Liotard’s best-known work, a pastel of about 1743 now in the Dresden Museum, Germany, shows a Meissen (Dresden) cup with a handle. The pastel is titled “ Das Schokoladenmaedchen “ (The Chocolate Girl). It portrays one Elizabeth Baldauf carrying a tray on which is a cup containing hot chocolate. The cup not only has a china handle; it is in a trembleuse , a metal gallery fitted to the saucer to stop the cup from wobbling about.

Liotard, born in 1702, lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1789, the year of the fall of the Bastille, Paris. Forty years separate “ Das Schokoladenmaedchen “ and the still life of teacups; and, supposing that all the teacups in the world were destroyed in a series of earthquakes, a historian who looked at the two paintings would no doubt draw the conclusion that teacups started off with handles but that then, in the interest of streamlined simplicity, these ungainly excrescences were abandoned. In fact, of course, the general progress of the teacup was the reverse of that.

Collecting teacups is the best way to start a china collection, and most of the cups you are likely to find will have handles. (A good way to display them is by fixing a line of hooks to the underside of a shelf and hanging the cups by their handles.) Teacups are excellent study pieces. They often bear the mark of a factory, such as the blue crescent of 18th-Century Worcester or the crowned “D” with crossed batons of Derby. It is a pity when the cups have lost their saucers, but they come less expensive that way, and there is always the possibility that you will find matching saucers.

The first thing you need to learn if you are starting a china collection is how to tell pottery from porcelain. It’s simple: Porcelain is translucent; pottery is opaque. The next thing you have to learn is much more difficult: how to tell “hard-paste” porcelain from “soft-paste.” Chinese porcelain is hard-paste; it has an icy glitter. Most English porcelain of the 18th Century is soft-paste; only a few factories, including Plymouth, Bristol and New Hall, Staffordshire, managed to achieve the hard-paste formula that combined kaolin, china clay, with petuntse , china stone. Soft-paste scratches easily; hard-paste does not, but then scratching china is not to be recommended as a scientific method.

Any collector who acquired the New Hall cup and saucer in the illustration at top would be fortunate. It is in the style that the British call Regency (after the Prince Regent, later King George IV) and the French call Empire (after the Emperor Napoleon). The designs on cup and saucer are naively provincial, probably copies after the fashion artist Adam Buck, who based his figures on classical Greek and Roman models. It is not clear whether the woman depicted on the cup is holding up the book to give the small girl an eye test or whether she is about to beat her over the head with it. The china painter could have done with a little of Liotard’s photographic realism.