Provenance
The porcelains were purchased from Dr. James McClure Henry (b. 1880), a Presbyterian missionary who lived in China from 1909 to 1948. Dr. Henry never suggested that these were antiques; he merely described the decoration in his first letter to du Pont. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese export ceramics for the American market were highly collectible and widely published. It therefore seems strange that scholars could find no mention of similar objects until the 1950s. In 1957 Charles Montgomery, then director of Winterthur Museum, wrote to Dr. Henry, who remembered that he purchased this porcelain in China between 1939 and 1947 from a dealer who, in turn, had acquired the pieces “from one family in particular that had fallen on evil days.”
Recent scientific analysis has identified materials in the overglaze enamels that were not used in China before the 20th century. It is now believed that these porcelains were made for the sesquicentennial celebrations in 1926 but were not shipped due to the disruptions in trade caused by the Chinese Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Japanese invasion of China. There was never any intention to deceive by either the makers or the seller; the pieces were just misunderstood.
