Rose Medallion 101: Building a Collection

By the time Rose Medallion was produced, trade between the West and China was flourishing although the most lucrative commodity for the Chinese was not porcelain, but instead tea and silks. Developed by the British East India Company and regulated by the Chinese emperors, Canton (Guangzhou) in South China stood as the main trading center, and merchants had to dock there to negotiate and purchase export goods.

You will sometimes hear the term Rose Canton to describe all of the Famille Rose style porcelains coming out of export production as a reference to this trading port. Canton is also used to denote blue and white export porcelain that depicted an exotic landscape with houses and bridge in a central medallion.

Importantly, the city of Canton was not just the shipping port for trade, but also the end of the production line for Chinese export porcelain as it was painted and re-fired here. The porcelain bodies were formed about 400 miles north of Canton at Ching-Tê-Chên (Jingdezhen) where the necessary ingredients, kaolin, were mined and mixed into a clay.

Painting depicts production of porcelain in Canton, Image via Gardiner Museum

Kaolin is the fundamental element for porcelain that gives it the hard, durable body, luster, and translucence. It is a decomposed feldspar of granite and petuntse that has to be ground down into a fine white powder then mixed with water to form a clay.

The production of porcelain was a highly labor intensive process with numerous steps. Forming the porcelain bodies for plates, bowls, jars, etc. took great skill and care, and these clay bodies had to be fired at high temperatures to vitrify the clay with great attention paid to the speed of rising and lowering of the temperatures in the kilns.

The undecorated hardened form is referred to as bisque-fired or biscuit form. These forms were then glazed before being painted with designs in the enamel Famille Rose palette and fired again. We call this decoration over-glaze. You will also see this referred to as polychrome decoration.

Basically, you need to understand that certain colors were painted on before the glaze — mainly cobalt blue and this is called under-glaze decoration. This technique is what you see most in the classic blue and white Chinese ceramics that are so popular. To learn more about enamel decoration read this.

Rose Medallion for the most part employs over-glaze decoration, but you do see later 19th century pieces combining both, which can be seen when examined with a loupe.

A Breakdown of Famille Rose Patterns

Too often Chinese export porcelains with pink in the color palette get referred to as Rose Medallion, but as I mentioned above, there are actually specific patterns with notable variations. Again we can think of Famille Rose as the umbrella category for porcelains using this color palette.

Famille Rose

A Chinese porcelain decorative style that developed by the 1720’s and was popular amongst the Imperial court under emperors Yongzheng and Qianlong. It used overglaze enamels in opaque or semi-opaque soft colors of pink, yellow, white, green, and blue. There is evidence the style and palette were developed utilizing European methods of mixing enamels and with the Western taste in mind. Designs were more artistic without a formalized repetitive pattern, and typically featured florals, landscapes, and figural scenes.

Rose Mandarin - A more formalized pattern that depicts Chinese figures in domestic and courtly scenes and pursuing leisure activities. The figural panels are often surrounded by a fanciful border of scrolling foliage, floral, and fauna. This pattern is the earliest of the rose Canton export designs and examples exist from the 18th century.

Rose Medallion - The most prolific of the rose Canton export patterns! It features a central medallion usually depicting a bird, tree peony, and/or rocks surrounded by four or more alternating panels of people then florals with fruits and birds. The panels also called reserves are outlined by intricate borders of c-scrolls set agains green tendrils and pink florals. Bats, butterflies, and birds often decorate the outer edges of a form or fill in the spaces between the reserves.

Collection of Rose Medallion porcelains, central plate is 1860s-1880s

Rose Medallion services were very popular in America, and we know that Ulysses S. Grant and his wife ordered a large service in the 1860’s as well as President James Buchanan who owned a service with his initials in the central medallion.

Soup dish with the monogram of Ulysses S. Grant, about 1868, Image via Peabody Essex Museum

Detail form Grant Soup Dish, Image via Peabody Essex Museum

The pattern perhaps reached its apogee in the middle of the 19th century, but production continued into the 20th century, and it is still being made today. The quality and delicacy of the pattern has changed and evolved over the years. Most collectors and scholars agree that the pattern declined in terms of intricacy and detailed depictions of the figures and fauna. More on that below!

Rose Canton - This is the third main Chinese export porcelain in the rose family. It features florals and fauna but no people. The layout of the designs is more ambiguous — sometimes depicted in panels and sometimes in a more free form arrangement.