Response and Responsibility

15 return to London I compared the bottles he identified as his with those he had copied, and I concluded, quite wrongly, that many more were by him than was in fact the case. My enthusiasm and triumph as a detective swamped any appropriate skepticism and I published the results. 6 He also told me, in some cases emphatically, what he did not do. For example, I showed him photographs of the small group of enamels-on-glass bottles with landscape designs and simulated-puddingstone surrounds ( fig. 7 ). He said he had never done enameled landscape bottles and had not painted those that I showed him. I asked again about these bottles several times, approaching the subject from different angles; the answer was always the same. When pressed a third or fourth time, he would say that perhaps his father had done them, but Ye did not think so. Ye had claimed to have done around thirty or forty pieces during his career as a faker, but as I noted in my earlier publication, he also seemed unreliable at identifying his own works ( fig. 8 ). On one occasion, for instance, he identified one side of a bottle as his and several days later, on a double-check, said that the other side was genuine and not Fig. 7. Enamels-on-glass landscape. Fig. 8. Repeat of figure 5 – a vessel Ye Bengqi specifically recalls making which was a vase until the neck misfired and was removed. by him. The number of pieces he claimed as his, however, might not have included those done in a second phase of his career in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he was teaching Wang Xisan the art of enameling. He identified one or two works from that period, and they are different. At the time I was unaware of this second group as a distinctly different phase and assumed that when he said he had done something around 1958, the work was part of a continuous output. That may have been the case, but I suspect there was a period of minimal enameling activity between the late1930s and the 1950s. Eventually, like the Shunzhi- bronze group, the numbers began to get in the way of reason. Further research led to the appearance over the years of dozens more of the type Ye claimed to have done. Given the difficulty of successfully producing enamels on glass, and the time-consuming process of multiple firings in a muffle-kiln, it was beginning to look as if Ye worked night and day for a lifetime to produce all the bottles I was beginning to assign to him. In fact the first phase of his faking lasted little more than twenty years, reportedly with very little demand during the latter part of that period and produced, by his own account, around forty pieces. There were obviously some serious discrepancies. If the Palace Museum was his only inspiration, Ye could not have made his first copies until after October 10, 1925, when the museum was first opened to the public after the expulsion of Pu Yi and his entourage from the Forbidden City. It remained open until 1937, when the