Dish with Bird on Fruit Tree Branch

Porcelain decorators in the Qing dynasty broadened the palette of naturalistic colors available to their predecessors with the technique of overglaze painting. They carefully painted designs in low-fire, lead-based glazes on top of undecorated glazed porcelains that had already been fired to the required 1200 degrees Celsius. After the pieces were painted, they were fired a second time to set and fix the glazes to the surface. With sharp images in translucent colors on thin white bodies, porcelains such as these mark the final technical and aesthetic accomplishment of the Chinese ceramic tradition.