Customer Reviews

Chinese Export Porcelain in the 19th Century: The Canton Famille Rose Porcelains

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This is a beautiful museum catalog of the Peabody Museums's famille rose porcelain collection. Many nice color illustrations of a wonderful collection. There are also a lot of black and white illustrations that are a little hard to make out. This is not a history of famille rose as such although there is a lot of historical information embedded in it. It is also not a collecting guide or price guide.

The reason that this book is so very fascinating has to do less with the subject than the author. It is a fine book to be sure, full of helpful and interesting information, but the author, John Quentin Feller, is far more intriguing. Feller was arrested in the early 90's because he was one of the most accomplished and compulsive art thieves in American history. He did 'research' in 8 major museums and stole from them. He didn't do it for monetary gain, though - he would 'donate' the pieces to other museums! Really, really interesting guy.