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The Choice of the Private Trader

The Private Market in Chinese Export Porcelain illustrated from the Hodroff Collection

David S. Howard

INCLUDES DEDICATION TO PREVIOUS OWNER AND SIGNATURE BY THE COLLECTORS DORIS AND LEO HODROFF

The Private Trade in Chinese Export porcelain, as distinct from East India Company Trade, has hitherto scarcely been recognised as a subject in its own right. And yet the officers and supercargoes of the Hon. East India Company took full advantage of their license to trade in their own capital risk, that is the most collected today. David S. Howard surveys more than two centuries of manufacture, and throws new light on how the trade was actually conducted. The Hodfroff Collection, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world, closely mirrors the tastes of the private traders and is the ideal source of illustration for this pioneering work. The porcelain is divided into six groups according to use - dinner services, tea and coffee sets, drinking vessels, personal and everyday utensils, decorative vases, and human and animal figures - in broadly chronological arrangement, akin to the way in which it became available on the market. The reader therefore sees the pieces much in the way they were first seen by the supercargoes and captains  who commissioned them in Canton, or chose them from the shelf in china shop in 'Thirteen Factory Street' behind the European hongs on the Pearl River. Drawing on extensive new research in East India Company and other records, and also on major findings from recently discovered seventeenth-and-eighteen century wrecks and their cargoes, The Choice of the Private Trader significantly extends our knowledge of Chinese Export porcelain, and with its 350 colour illustrations presents and exciting addition to the select literature of essential ceramic reference books.

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