In underglaze blue painting there is another class with landscapes and figures, such as bowls, of which there are infinite variety, which convey, in lieu of regular ornament, a certain atmosphere. Even the ordinary ginger jar of commerce, if it be old enough, exhibits a most alluring suggestiveness. These designs appear to be traditional on common ginger jars half a century apart in point of time. There is a background of mountains, and stretch of sky with a triangular flight of birds, flying high. There is a tree in the foreground, and a rustic homestead. On a bank a fisherman casts a line into the water, and away on the expanse of lake stands a junk. The whole is crudely and hastily drawn, and one jar, if not exactly the counterpart of another, has the same details in the scene. But, curiously enough, there is a poetry and depth of tone about these common ginger jars which is difficult to define. To arrive at a technical reason for these differences in styles is to examine the theories governing the art of ceramics. To take the overglaze painting; this may be compared to the canvas of the painter which is covered with pigment. His sky is blue or red or yellow or an admixture of all three; the reflections of light on the water are touches of pigment. There is no part of the canvas over which his deft brush has not travelled. The underglaze painter on porcelain is like the etcher, who obtains his illumination from the uncovered surface of the copper upon which he works. The untouched portion of the plate of the etcher forms the wide expanse of sky, and gives luminosity to the deeply bitten lines of his subject. Similarly, in underglaze painting on porcelain, the dazzling white expanse of the body, afterwards to be coated with limpid transparent glaze, is the background into which the design of the artist must imperceptibly melt. It is this depth of tone and atmosphere which give poetic charm to underglaze painting. But the _subject_ is not left to take care of itself. Without pictorial indefinition the work may still remain on the plain of formal decoration even though that be superlatively conceived and executed. [Illustration: VASE. Painted in underglaze colours by V. Th. Fischer. Height 13 inches.] [Illustration: VASE. Painted in underglaze colours by C. Liisberg. Height 20 inches.] What is it that one sees when one comes face to face for the first time with a Copenhagen vase of this golden period? The merest dilettante in porcelain-collecting must at once recognize something that he will find nowhere else in his cabinets. In form there is always, necessarily, a full expanse to carry the subject, if it be landscape. Nor is there a front and a reverse, as in the old school of conventionally treated landscapes circumscribed by panels. There is a breadth and continuity of subject traversing the circumference of the vase, which, from new points of view, offers new surprises.