Why so blue?
‘A peculiar mineral of a beautiful purple shade, only found at one or two places in the world’, Blue John is one of Britain’s most glamorous geological treasures. Matthew Dennison explores its enduring appeal
Derbyshire Blue John, with its myriad colours (left), is a British geological treasure and a star of the Royal Collection. Matthew Dennison tells its tale
ASSIDUOUS bluestocking letterwriter Mrs Delany described an exhibition to Viscountess Andover of nearly 400 ormolumounted objects, staged at Christie’s by designer and industrialist Matthew Boulton in the spring of 1771, as ‘bear[ing] a price only for those who have superfluous money’. Among the costliest pieces were ones made from a consignment of 14 tonnes of a colourful Derbyshire fluorspar called Blue John, which the designer had acquired in March 1769.
Boulton was a man of sound commercial instincts and Blue John was the fashionable luxury material of the moment. With its striking veining and variations in colour, from darkest amethyst to pale lemon, soft amber and ruddy bull’s-blood umber, the boldly marked stone was an ideal foil for the decorative ormolu mounts that Boulton, as a designer with a particular interest in metalsmithing, was determined to perfect in his Birmingham manufactory.
Blue John mining had begun only a decade earlier, near the small Peak District village of Castleton in Derbyshire. Although the Victorians later concocted romantic tales of the mineral’s discovery by the Romans, its emergence was more recent, with first excavations probably no earlier than the beginning of the 18th century.
Its value and decorative potential were recognised from the outset. As early as December 1768, Boulton made plans to take a lease on the Blue John mine to guarantee supply. These plans failed, but Boulton’s success, early in 1770, in winning a commission from George III’S wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-strelitz, to produce a pair of candelabra-mounted Blue John urns and urn-shaped, ormolu-mounted Blue John perfume burners set the seal on the mineral’s desirability. Today, these items stand beside a handsome Blue John-encased clock, also by Boulton, on the chimneypiece of The Queen’s private sitting room in Windsor Castle.
All five pieces were designed by the royal architect William Chambers, whose decision to exhibit drawings of their designs at the Royal Academy later the same year won Boulton publicity of the most respectable variety.
The Boulton/chambers Blue John pieces in the Royal Collection represent a high point in the history of the English decorative arts. Simon Phillips, of distinguished Mayfair antiques dealer Ronald Phillips, describes the clock as ‘probably the finest Blue John object ever made’. To look today at this ravishing, rarefied piece, with its decoration of bright ormolu animal masks and Facing page: Hard stone or fairy wings? Above left: Ormolu-mounted candle and perfume vase, 1770, by Matthew Boulton. Above right: The Warwick Castle ‘caryatic’ Candle Vase. Below: Red veins in Blue John snake-handled ewers and its rich-purple body panels, is to be transported a long way from the harsh reality of 18th-century mining.
Today’s visitors to Castleton’s Blue John mines find themselves in a green and hilly landscape, overshadowed by the Norman ruins of Peveril Castle and still resembling its description by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in 1910, as ‘a most lonely spot’ of picturesque walks and ‘irregular’ valleys: ‘On each side are the fantastic limestone hills, formed
‘The blue-john pieces represent a high point in the history of English decorative arts ’
‘ The pairing of Blue John with ormolu was supremely luxurious and intensely elegant ’
of rock so soft that you can break it away in your hands… There are gaps everywhere amid the rocks, and when you pass through them you find yourself in great caverns, which wind down into the bowels of the earth.’
Among Conan Doyle’s caverns are those in which Blue John has been mined for 300 years, dramatic limestone enclosures dripping with stalactites. The Blue John Cavern is home to eight different veins of Derbyshire Blue John and is open to the public, with many of the tour guides themselves miners.
Boulton’s haul of 14 tonnes of this rarest of British minerals is inconceivable today. For more than a century, mining has been restricted. The annual output of the Blue John Cavern and nearby Treak Hill Cavern is currently less than a tonne and the stone itself, far from being transported to independent manufacturers such as Boulton, is worked locally in Castleton, mostly made into jewellery and small decorative objects.
In 2013, a deposit of Blue John in Treak Cliff Cavern, first reported in 1945 and subsequently lost when the miner who found it died, was rediscovered. Vicky Turner, whose family owns and manages the cavern, describes it as ‘a sizeable deposit and we conservatively estimate that there’s enough Blue John stone in this deposit to keep us busy for the next decade at least’.
Two years later, miner Gary Ridley discovered another new vein of Blue John in the cavern, when experimenting with a stone chainsaw (almost all mining of the mineral is done by hand without blasting, because it damages the colouration). This particular variant has since been named after him: the Ridley Vein. Mrs Turner draws attention to ‘its beautiful swirling patterns of purple and blue’. For Mr Phillips, it’s the ‘variety of the Blue John, its different shades of colour or quantity of veining’ that distinguishes Blue John objects from similar pieces made of marble or ceramics. He also points to ‘the immense scale of some of the objects made in the past: some of the urns are very large indeed’. One example is a vase Ronald Phillips has sold on two previous occasions and is now selling for a third time, the Warwick Castle ‘caryatic’ Candle Vase of about 1770. This intense-purple, urn-shaped vase with scrolling ormolu candelabra by Boulton was described with matter-of-fact understatement in an 1809 inventory as ‘a Derbyshire Pedestal and urn with four branches’. An even larger vase was sold at Masterpiece several years ago, by Midlands-based Thomas Coulborn & Sons. Attributed to
maker James Shore, the Regency krater-form Greek Revival vase is more than 2ft tall. It’s almost certainly, says Jonathan Coulborn, ‘the biggest Blue John vase ever made’ and something of a legend among aficionados of the mineral. (An engraving of this remarkable vase was published as early as 1843, in William Adam’s Derbyshire travelogue The
Gem of the Peak.)
The size of this vase necessitated construction in sections—in this case, bands of strongly veined ‘Organ Room Vein’ and ‘Bull Beef Vein’ Blue John, joined using pine resin. Unlike earlier vases produced by Boulton, the Shore vase is without metal mounts: instead, the handles are decorated with roundels of leopards’ masks also carved from Blue John and the decorative quality of the piece derives chiefly from the striking appearance of the mineral itself. Recently, Thomas Coulborn & Sons sold a pair of Regency campana-form Blue John urns, with ormolu mounts made by the largely forgotten Birmingham firm of Smith & Chamberlain. Although early19th-century pieces differ from their 18th-century predecessors in terms of shape, designers and patrons evidently continued to hold the pairing of Blue John with ormolu in the highest esteem, the combination of polished stone and burnished metal being supremely luxurious and intensely elegant. As Mr Phillips notes, such pieces represented to their owners a means ‘of displaying wealth tastefully’. Undoubtedly, the glory days of creating Blue John objects are past. Conservation considerations are among factors that will limit the nature of future craftsmanship using this most glamorous of native minerals
and few of us can expect to receive a present such as that given to George V and Queen Mary by the Prince Regent and Princess Paul of Yugoslavia, recorded in Queen Mary’s Catalogue of Bibelots in 1937. Felicitously, Prince Paul presented them with a pair of Boulton Blue John sphinx vases to match the pair acquired by Queen Charlotte in 1770.