SARAH LAURSEN
Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art at Harvard Art Museums
SINCE JOINING THE Harvard Art Museums in 2020, I have had the pleasure of overseeing the care and study of The Walter C. Sedgwick Foundation Collection of Early Chinese Ceramics. However, it was Robert D. Mowry, the inaugural Alan J. Dworsky curator, who guided its formation and shepherded its transfer to Harvard (1). I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mr Mowry to discuss his passion for Chinese ceramics and the critical role he played in shaping the Sedgwick Collection.
SARAH LAURSEN — What were your earliest experiences with Asian art and how did they contribute to your interest in the connoisseurship of Chinese ceramics?
ROBERT D. MOWRY — My earliest Asian art training was in Korean art while serving in the United States Peace Corps in Suwon, South Korea (1967–1969). Laurence Sickman, then the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, had given me a letter of introduction to Dr Kim Chewon, then the Director of the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. Dr Kim taught me about early Korean ceramics and Buddhist sculpture, and I had my first look at masterworks of Korean art in the museum storerooms, which sparked my interest in Asian art. Initially, I thought I would study Korean art when I returned to the US, but instead I pivoted to Chinese art. In 1970, I did a year of intensive Chinese language study at Ohio State University before returning to the University of Kansas, where I had received my Bachelor degree with honours in 1967, and completed my graduate studies between 1971 and 1975.
Those graduate students specialising in Chinese art met with Mr Sickman once a week, every week, for four years, participating in a graduate seminar titled “Studies in Connoisseurship”. Mr Sickman would spend the full day with us, meeting us individually in the morning to discuss research projects and then conducting a seminar in the afternoon using objects from the collection of the Nelson Gallery (as the Nelson-Atkins Museum was then known). That is how I received solid, hands-on training in connoisseurship, which stands in marked contrast to my undergraduate training, which relied on teaching with slides and photographs rather than with original works of art. My own field of specialisation in graduate school was Chinese paintings of the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1368) dynasties, one of the many topics that Mr Sickman taught, with original works of art drawn from the museum storerooms.
Following my graduation in 1975, I worked as a translator and curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Calligraphy at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. As I was also doing dissertation research, I was permitted to join scholars visiting from abroad to study paintings from the reserve collections in storage and thus came to know such well-known specialists as James Cahill (1926–2014), Richard Edwards (1916–2016), and Suzuki Kei (鈴木敬, 1920–2007), among others. In my generation, few students had the privilege of learning directly from museum and private collections, so my classmates and I were indeed fortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s, art history, like many other humanistic disciplines, witnessed a shift to theory, espousing deconstruction and semiotics, among other new methodologies, and leaving behind “the old art history”, which emphasised formal analysis. Even so, in determining the authenticity of a particular piece and its date and place of manufacture, one necessarily must turn to style, iconography, connoisseurship, and any relevant archaeological data. Students need to be trained in all the various methodologies so that when they are ready to do their own scholarly research, they can choose the ones that best answer the questions of their project.
SL — When and how did you start working at the Harvard Art Museums? What did the collection look like when you first started, and what were your goals for developing the collection?
RDM — I began working at the Fogg Art Museum, now one of the three Harvard Art Museums, on August 15th, 1977. I worked at the museum for three years as Assistant Curator of Oriental Art, as the field was then called, after which I moved to New York, where I served from 1980 until 1986 as the first curator of The Asia Society’s Mr and Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of Asian Art. I returned to Harvard as Associate Curator of Chinese Art in October 1986. When John Rosenfield retired in 1991, James Cuno, the museum’s then Director, appointed me as Curator of Chinese Art and head of the Department of Asian Art. In 2000, Alan and Suzanne Dworsky established the Dworsky curatorship, to which Jim Cuno appointed me and which I held until I retired in 2013.
When I arrived in 1977, the museum’s Asian collection encompassed the Edward B. Bruce Collection of Chinese paintings from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties (acquired in 1923); the Arthur B. Duel Collection of Japanese prints, including surimono (1933); the Samuel C. Davis Collection of late Ming porcelains (1940); the Ernest B. and Helen Pratt Dane Collection of later Chinese jade and ceramics, including a number of Jun wares and brown and black-glazed wares (1942); the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection of Chinese bronzes, jades, and Buddhist sculptures (1943); the important, but anonymous, gift of Chinese bronzes (1944); the Mr and Mrs Nicholas Brown Collection of rhinoceros horn cups; and the C. Adrian Rübel Collection of modern Japanese prints (1978), along with individual works given by numerous other donors. The Hofer Collection of the Printed and Graphic Arts of Asia was at that time on loan to the museum as a promised gift; ownership of the collection was transferred to Harvard in 1984 and 1985, following Philip Hofer’s death in 1984. The Harvard collection included few Korean works, early Chinese ceramics, or modern and contemporary Asian works in any medium.
Lacking endowed funds for the acquisition of Asian art in the 1970s and 1980s, the museum out of necessity relied on the generosity of collectors and other donors to expand the Asian collection. Given the economic recession at the time, the museum made few Asian acquisitions in the late 1970s, when I first joined the staff, but I began to build the collection on my return as Associate Curator in 1986 (2). With a dwindling number of museum-quality works of art available for purchase, with rapidly escalating prices, and with ever more emphasis on provenance, Jim Cuno understood that the window for collection building was closing, so he made acquisitions a top institutional priority during his tenure as director (1992–2002). When I became head of the museum’s Asian department on the retirement of John Rosenfield (1924–2013) in 1991, I assessed the situation — identifying the collection’s strengths and weaknesses and balancing that against realistic possibilities for acquisition — determining that the museum, with abundant luck and lots of hard work, could reasonably and fruitfully build collections in Korean art (both paintings and ceramics), early Chinese ceramics, Song ceramics, and modern and contemporary Chinese paintings. Apart from research, writing catalogues and teaching, expanding the museum’s holdings in those areas thus became the focus of my work from the early 1990s until my retirement early in 2013.
SL — In your time at Harvard, how did faculty, staff and students use the Asian collections?
RDM — John Rosenfield actively used objects — especially the Japanese prints and the Hofer materials — in teaching his graduate students, but there were no designated spaces for art viewing that would accommodate larger undergraduate classes. Retiring in 1974, Max Loehr (1903–1988), a renowned authority on Chinese art, was no longer teaching when I arrived in 1977, but he had trained his students in the fields of early Chinese bronzes and jades, using works in the storied Winthrop Collection. I myself taught every other year, usually one or another aspect of Chinese ceramics or Korean art. I typically lectured on Mondays and Wednesdays and taught with objects from the storerooms on Fridays.
During the tenure (1977–2004) of Eugene Farrell (1933–2012) as senior conservation scientist in the museum’s conservation department — now called the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies — he taught a course on analytical methods. In the early 1990s, Eugene led a group of graduate students and conservation interns in conducting technical studies on the black and brown-glazed wares slated for inclusion in my 1995–1996 exhibition, “Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown- and Black-Glazed Ceramics, 400–1400” (3). I passed along the questions I wanted answered, such as, “What are the components of the glaze? What is the colouring agent? What is the percentage of iron oxide in the glaze? What is the composition of the ceramic body?” Those were the early days of scientific examination of Chinese ceramics, and much more could be done today, but we were lucky to have had on the museum staff a scientist, who could conduct such analyses on works of art at that time, and I think we did an excellent job.
SL — How did you become interested in ceramics? What drew you to them?
RDM — Even though I specialised in Chinese painting of the Yuan and Ming dynasties as a graduate student, I had received training in Chinese bronzes, ceramics and Buddhist sculptures in the connoisseurship courses with Laurence Sickman. And while working at the National Palace Museum in the mid-1970s, I paid frequent visits to the galleries and often talked with the curators specialising in Chinese ceramics and ancient bronzes, pursuing the interest in those materials that Mr Sickman had sparked in his seminar sessions. When I came to Harvard, I determined that I wanted to remain in that position for the duration of my career, circumstances permitting. However, as the strengths of the collection did not directly overlap with my training in Song and Yuan painting — nor would it be possible to develop a collection in that direction — I realised I would need to focus on other areas of Chinese art. I also recognised that my own interests and skills were in working with three-dimensional objects, like bronzes, jades and Buddhist sculpture, rather than two-dimensional ones.
Given that Harvard had strong holdings of brown and black wares and of Jun wares, along with numerous other ceramics, I felt that Chinese ceramics could be a new area of specialisation for me, especially as others were already investigating the museum’s collections of ancient bronzes, jades and Buddhist sculptures. The only other American scholars studying Chinese ceramics at the time were Suzanne G. Valenstein at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Jean Gordon Lee (1916–1997) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Having studied Chinese art more broadly than the other American specialists in Chinese ceramics and having studied with Laurence Sickman, I thought I could bring a slightly different perspective to the field (as witnessed by my co-operation with Eugene Farrell in conducting scientific analyses of Chinese ceramics). I also preferred reading archaeological texts to inscriptions on paintings and abstruse treatises in classical Chinese. In the end, I switched fields — from Chinese paintings to Chinese ceramics — although my interest in and love of fine Chinese paintings continue to this day.
On a more practical level, I enjoy handling objects. So much can be learned from the materiality of objects. For example, a Qing copy of a Song ceramic will almost certainly be too light in weight, giving immediate insight into the actual date of the piece. In the connoisseurship seminar on Chinese ceramics, Mr Sickman taught with objects from the Nelson Gallery collection, as previously noted. When it came time for tests, he also tested with objects, but they were “blind-identification exams”. That is, he tested the students one by one, seating each student at a table on which he had placed a ceramic piece and covered it with a cloth. Mr Sickman would then ask the student to handle the piece under the cloth, without looking at it, and to identify it purely by feel. One had to translate what one had seen and been told into tactile knowledge. What is the height of the footring? Is the footring triangular or rectangular? Is the base flat or slightly convex? What about the shape — does it flare at the lip? Now I can’t see a ceramic without picking it up to judge its weight and to observe all of its physical and stylistic characteristics. Without thinking, I turn plates upside down at restaurants, not to see the manufacturer’s mark but to critically observe the underside, invariably causing consternation amongst the staff who typically then ask: “Is it dirty?” or “Is something wrong?” I like the physicality of the pieces, from the texture of the glaze to roughness of the foot.
SL — What makes Chinese ceramics important? What are some common misconceptions about them that you have encountered?
RDM — In premodern times, a civilisation’s mastery of heat, as evinced by fine ceramics and metalwork, is an excellent mirror of that civilisation’s general level of technological prowess. In casting bronzes, the foundrymen need to focus only on heating the crucible to a temperature sufficiently high to melt the metal, but a kiln, which can be as large as a room, presents much more complicated, much more difficult issues. It might be compared to the problem presented by the fireplace in a living room — how do you ensure that the heat uniformly fills the entire space rather than simply going up the chimney with the smoke?
I became very interested in kiln construction and evolution and how potters in different regions found different solutions to this problem. At Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province, potters developed the dragon kiln, sometimes called a climbing kiln, but potters in the north, such as those at the Ding, Yaozhou, Jun, Ru and Cizhou kilns, developed other types of kilns. Master potters of China had created kilns of a type that permitted them to produce stoneware, which requires sustained kiln temperatures in the range of 1100° to 1200° C, as early as the Shang dynasty (circa 1600–1100 BC). In fact, they were the first in the world to produce stoneware. Chinese potters had exclusive knowledge of this technology until roughly the 5th century, when Koreans, under Chinese influence, learned to produce stoneware. By the 6th century, the Japanese had learned to create stoneware from the Koreans and produced Sue ware. The Romans, by contrast, were advanced in metallurgy and architecture, but were not very sophisticated with ceramics, at least not with high-fired ceramics. I always found that intriguing.
Many people don’t understand the technical level of complexity involved in producing ceramics. When people hear that you specialise in Chinese ceramics, they often mistakenly assume you are talking about your grandmother’s tea service, perhaps transported from China by ship as part of the 18th and 19th century China trade. While export blue and white porcelains are beautiful and are fascinating in terms of global trade, I am more interested in earlier ceramics. People don’t necessarily think about what an achievement the incremental evolution of the potter’s art is, from achieving and sustaining precisely the right firing temperature and controlling the kiln atmosphere to developing glaze formulas to achieve just the right colour. Trial and error, combined with exceptionally high standards, a desire for perfection and a burning interest in exploring every possibility, led to those achievements (4)!
SL — How did you meet Walter Sedgwick? How did the idea for the Sedgwick Collection of Chinese ceramics come about? What were some of your goals in bringing it to Harvard? Why does the collection focus on the early period?
RDM — I have known Walter since autumn 1977. At that time, he owned and operated a bookstore called Asian Books, on Bow Street near Harvard Square in Cambridge; it was one of the few stores of its day in the United States dedicated to Western-language books on Asia. Walter was very interested in Japanese sculpture, thanks to the late 13th century sculpture representing Shotoku Taishi that he inherited from his grandfather, Ellery Sedgwick (1872–1960) (2019.122); a Harvard graduate, he frequently visited the museum to meet John Rosenfield, a renowned specialist in Japanese art, particularly Japanese Buddhist sculpture, and to audit classes. Through Walter’s visits to the museum and my visits to Asian Books, we became friends. Not long after I moved to New York in 1980, Walter and his wife moved to California; although we weren’t in frequent contact during those years, we exchanged Christmas cards and occasionally saw each other in New York or San Francisco. About the time I returned to Harvard late in 1986, Walter was rekindling his interest in Asian art; in the meantime, he had bought several Chinese paintings, thus taking the initial steps towards becoming a collector of Asian art.
In the early 1990s, Walter came to me and said he would like to build a collection that he would one day transfer to Harvard. He wanted the collection to be comprehensive — the largest, finest, most complete collection of its type in the West — and he wanted it to be financially within reach. Those two stipulations — a large, comprehensive collection that would not be exorbitantly priced — ruled out many possible media. Under those circumstances, I immediately thought of early Chinese ceramics, not only because I like to study ceramics, but also because the museum has substantial holdings of early Chinese art in three media — bronze, jade and stone — but was almost completely lacking in early ceramics. In adding a collection of early ceramics, Harvard would truly have one of the strongest collections of early Chinese art in the US — indeed, in the West (5). Already fond of ceramics from China’s Warring States period (475–221 BC), Walter immediately embraced the idea; over the course of several years and many conversations, we refined our ideas for the collection, determined that it would focus exclusively on vessels, and expanded the chronological range from the Neolithic period (circa 6500–1700 BC) to the Liao (907–1125) and Jin (1115–1234) dynasties. Apart from rounding out the museum’s holdings of early Chinese art, these early ceramics would also provide the foundation for the museum’s already strong holdings of Song, Ming and other ceramics.
SL — You famously like to talk about your favourite artworks as your “grab and run” pieces. Which are they in the Sedgwick collection? What drew you to them?
RDM — One is a Majiayao culture jar with geometric decor that dates between circa 3300 and circa 2650 BC (2006.170.15). I love its aesthetics. All Neolithic ceramics from north-west China are the same in terms of technique of manufacture: beautifully hand-built pots with decoration painted in black or burgundy slip, which was a brilliant technological innovation. This jar has a very simple decorative scheme — horizontal lines, hatched diagonals and circles painted in black slip — but its geometric and linear patterns are joined in a very harmonious way that I find enormously intriguing and very satisfying. It’s a very personal aesthetic reaction, not an art historical or scholarly one. There is a fabulous Banshan culture jar (2006.170.30) made between circa 2650 and circa 2300 BC that has a more complicated “checkerboard-and-swirl pattern” painted in black and burgundy slips, which is a very dynamic, yet very stable, very satisfying pattern (6).
Another of my “grab and run” pieces is a white cup with a ring handle from the Dawenkou culture (2006.170.82), which dates between circa 4300 and circa 2600 BC and which, due to its sleek shape and white clay, looks ever so modern. It is extraordinarily rare, as is another thin-walled, wheel-turned, Neolithic vessel from north-east China, a lidded tripod from the Longshan culture that was made between circa 2600 and circa 2000 BC (2006.170.101). Very important for its early use of intentionally applied ash glaze, a jar from the Western Zhou period (circa 1100–771 BC), that dates to the 9th to 8th century BC, also ranks among my favourite pieces in the Sedgwick Collection (2006.170.129).
Although it doesn’t photograph well, a very compelling Western Han period (206 BC–AD 9) covered jar (2006.170.164) (7a) from the 2nd to 1st century BC ties in well with a contemporaneous and virtually identically shaped gilt-bronze jar in the Winthrop Collection (1943.52.124) (7b). And I’m not the only who loves it. When we brought the ceramic jar in as a loan, Jim Cuno immediately remarked: “I want my ashes to be buried in that jar”. There are also beautiful cold-painted pieces (2006.170.173 and 2006.170.174) from the Western Han period whose swirling designs derive from those on contemporaneous lacquer. The painting on these rare pieces is exceptionally well preserved; applied to the vessels after firing, the mineral pigments are affixed with an adhesive, possibly untinted lacquer, that typically loses its efficacy over time with the result that the pigments flake and are lost.
The several vessels with lead-fluxed, emerald-green and orange-brown glazes are not only beautiful, but signal the beginning of the era in which most ceramics will be glazed, even if these particular pieces boast low-fired glazes rather than the high-fired glazes that will come to typify the later Chinese ceramic tradition (i.e. post-Han tradition). From the 3rd to the early 4th century, a butterscotch-brown glazed water dropper in the form of a standing beast holding a small “ear cup” in its mouth is also quite special (2006.170.207), and I have always loved the Yue ware vessel, also in the form of a mystical beast, that also dates to the 3d to 4th century (2006.170.213) (8). Several excellent white wares (2006.170.243 and 2006.170.247) (9), dating to the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties, foreshadow the taste for white porcelains that would dominate the Chinese ceramic tradition from the Yuan period onwards. Finally, a stoneware jar with brown glaze splashed with blue, from the 9th century, is gorgeous even without the cover it once sported (2006.170.253).
SL — How did you imagine students and scholars would use this collection?
RDM — Our priorities were to create a collection for public display, but also and especially for teaching and research by students, faculty and other scholars. Not every piece in the collection had to be a masterpiece, or even a display piece, even if most are more than worthy of gallery display. A teaching collection is not just about aesthetics; rather, it is also about experimental pieces, wares of variant types, and pieces that illustrate the development from one type of ware to another. For example, a full understanding of Banshan culture ceramics necessitates a look not just at the large, bulbous, slip painted jars for which the culture is most famous, but also at some of the small grey jars the potters produced as well (2006.170.36 and 2006.170.41). We intentionally chose to assemble a comprehensive collection that demonstrates the range of wares produced in a variety of styles at various kilns from Neolithic times and into the 12th and the early 13th century. The future will see discoveries of types of wares not represented in the collection, but any collection represents the availability and tastes of the time when it was created.
We assembled as comprehensive a collection as circumstances permitted with the idea that it would be useful for a broad range of teaching. That is, if a professor wants to teach a course on Neolithic ceramics, there would be plenty of examples that students could observe in person and that relate to the excavated works shown in slides during lectures. It would also be accessible to more general teaching about the evolution of technologies and styles, and it would allow students to draw comparisons with bronzes, jades and other materials from the same chronological periods. Without a highly developed ceramic art, for example, the Chinese would not have evolved the complicated piece mould technique for casting bronzes, which permitted the creation of the famous ritual bronze vessels from the Shang dynasty (circa 1600–1100 BC), such as those in the Winthrop Collection, which rank among the finest examples of bronze casting the world has ever seen, thus demonstrating the close relationship between early Chinese ceramics and bronzes in terms of shape and function, as well as in technical aspects. Thus, the early ceramics would figure prominently in teaching about early bronze casting in China. The collection could also be juxtaposed with other cultures to show regional development.
We at the Harvard Art Museums are tremendously grateful to Walter Sedgwick, Robert Mowry and Melissa Moy for their efforts in creating the collection and bringing it to the attention of students, scholars and art lovers all over the world.
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