Owen Jones - Examples of Chinese Ornament - 1867 - plate 086

This image shows plate LXXXVI (= 86). Jones’ original description of this plate from his “Description of the plates” (page 9–15), transcribed literally, using Jones’ orthography:

“Portion of a painted china Dish: four dragons guarding the labyrinth form the subject of the composition, the flowers are most artistically arranged in the fragmentary style.”

Additional hints by Commons users:

The “four dragons” (as Jones calls them) do not look like typical dragons in Chinese art. Could these four creatures be some kind of birds, maybe a Phoenix?!

Again, like in his comment on plate LXXIII, Jones calls the Chinese character in the centre a “labyrinth”. But isn’t it just a stylized Shou character, or something similar?!

About the file format: I have added the images of the plates as individual image files, and not the complete book as a single PDF/DjVu file, because (a) the quality of the individual images is somewhat better than the quality of the images in a PDF/DjVU file, (b) for many users it is easier to use the individual image files than to extract any image from the PDF/DjVu file first, and (c) the use of individual images for the plates allows us to add special categories or other hints to any of the images, as appropriate. — The original image files on the website (see Source) are JPEG 2000 (.jp2) files, but JPEG 2000 is not a completely free file format and (therefore?!) currently not supported by Commons; saving the image files in JPEG format would have introduced some loss of quality; therefore I have converted the image files to PNG files.