Response and Responsibility

14 sometimes produce inside-painted bottles as well and the mistake he had made was to transfer his painting style to the enamel fakes, thus allowing me to identify them. Well, that is what I thought at the time and once that thought was in my mind, it assumed the status of a premise in my youthful enthusiasm. If the enamels and the inside-painted bottles were of the same style and subjects, Ye must have transferred his characteristic style from the family art form to his fake enamels. Therefore, anything with these characteristics in enamels was likely to be by Ye and therefore fake. It was a simple enough deduction, but one I now believe to have been both foolishly wrong and very misleading. What happened, in fact, was quite the he considered himself a competent faker of those wares. Ye ’ s pre-1949 inside-painted bottles are in an enameled style. Even after 1949 the enameling style can be seen in his works and in some of the paintings by his pupils. If his counterfeiting and his knowledge of the designs taken from the Imperial Collection would have influenced his inside- painting style, we are faced with a quite different scenario than I had believed previously and with more genuine works than has been assumed. Having tracked Ye to his studio, I showed him dozens of photographs and books I had brought with me, and he identified a number of bottles and other objects as his work ( fig. 6 ). It is possible that given the atmosphere of those interviews and his age, he may have claimed as his own some bottles which were in fact genuine. It is hardly surprising that after forty years he might confuse the bottles he faked with those he was copying. The mistake of identifying too many works as from his hand was my own, however. Upon my Fig. 6. Ye interviews. opposite; Ye had developed his inside-painting style from genuine enameled wares in the Imperial collection which were first shown in 1925 in Beijing. The enameling style was derived not from his inside-painted bottles, but instead the bottles were derived fromt he enamel style of the Imperial Collection. The style came, in short, from the Palace enamels he was copying, which meant that not everything reflecting that style had to be by him. Many might be genuine, including the ones he copied. I am aware of how obvious this sounds now, but it simply did not occur to me at the time. Ye Bengqi was the third son of Ye Zhongsan and by the time he became of a useful age to help in the family workshops, demand for its products had fallen off, dramatically decreasing in the ensuing decade. Because of this Ye learned the art of faking enamels. He frequently went to the newly opened Palace Museum where, forbidden to either take photographs or draw, he memorized objects and returned home to capture them on paper. After three years of this,