In pursuit of the perfect porcelain
ONE of the most dramatic manhunts in world history wasn’t in pursuit of a man but of a young boy, a runaway alchemist’s apprentice from Dresden.
In 1701, Johann Friedrich Bottger, absconded, taking with him the secret, supposedly, of how to make gold from base metal.
The soldiers of Frederick I, King of Prussia, were sent to find him. When they did, he was arrested and imprisoned in a cell kitted out with crucibles and a workman’s bench. He was instructed to make gold.
What he did make, after six years of confinement, obsessive madness, the investment of many thousands of royal ducats, and with the aid of the natural philosopher Tschirnhaus, was something even better: porcelain, the fine, tactile pure white clay coveted by craftsmen, connoisseurs and emperors.
This substance has been made and revered for 1,000 years since the Chinese first began using it for their bowls and vases.
You cannot dig it from the ground like ordinary clay. It is made of two minerals: petuntse (‘little white bricks’ in Chinese) which gives the porcelain its translucency and hard outer body; and kaolin (‘high hill’), which gives porcelain its plasticity.
When these are fired together at intense heat, they fuse to a material which is pure white and shell thin. Once glazed, it can be any colour. Porcelain is a highly- strung, temperamental clay, prone to tiny, but ruinous, cracks.
Now, the history of porcelain is the subject of a fascinating new book The White Road: A Pilgrimage Of Sorts by Edmund de Waal, a potter and author of the best- selling The Hare With Amber Eyes, which traced a series of netsuke — Japanese carved figurines — that had belonged to his Jewish family before the Nazi occupation of Vienna and Paris.
In The White Road, de Waal travels to the great centres of porcelain — China, Dresden and our own Cornish hills — and attempts to understand what it is about this white gold that has fired men’s imaginations often to the point of bankruptcy, ruin and insanity. There’s even a name for it: Porzellankrankheit — porcelain sickness.
Porcelain continues to inspire admiration and adoration today. It is the stuff of wedding lists and christening gifts and commemorative plates. More commercial methods of production have put prices in the reach of High Street shoppers. It’s no longer just Chinese and Prussian emperors who drink from porcelain cups.
Wedgwood remains one of the great makers of porcelain in this country. Their Tisbury range of porcelain jugs, plates and bowls, designed by Jasper Conran (from
£10, wedgwood.co.uk) are classically elegant, while their enduringly popular Peter Rabbit mugs (from £13) are just the thing for godparents at a loss for a present.
Royal Worcester is the place for traditional peony patterned tea cups and saucers (£122.40 for four,
royalworcester. co. uk), while Portmeirion has the modish Coast range of breakfast ware in cobalt, yellow and ochre
(from £19, portmeirion.
co.uk). John Lewis stock a range of porcelain pendant lights from Original BTC (£199, johnlewis.
com) which are made in Stokeon-Trent, the centre of pottery in Britain. But there is nothing so pleasingly tactile as a porcelain bowl which has been hand- thrown and still bears the distinctive rings formed as the clay turns on the wheel.
Jo Davies is a ceramicist with a studio in East London. She is drawn to porcelain’s translucent quality and the way it glows. Her twisting pendant lights (from £95, jo-davies.
com) are marked by spirals that circumnavigate the shades, a visible mark of the making process. Jo graduated to porcelain only when she had refined her skills on more robust clays. She values its elasticity, the way it moves and stretches, but warns that ‘it does punish you if you’re not careful’.
She gilds the necks of her porcelain Speak vases (£145), making them doubly precious, while her hooped egg cups (£27 a pair) look like a tower of pancakes. It’s fun to eat something as mundane as a boiled egg from so refined a cup.
Bridget Drakeford, a potter working near Hereford, has been enthralled by porcelain since being taken to the British Museum to see the Chinese vases as a child.
SHE uses celadon (pale blue-green) and deep copper red glazes on her teapots, which cost from £ 120 to £ 360. Bridget accepts commissions if you have a particular shape or colour in mind ( bdporcelain.co.uk).
Anja Lubach makes porcelain vases and bowls so delicate they might be chrysalises. You can recognise her work by its distinctive relief patterns of serene Madonna faces and roses.
Her bowls look lovely with tealights inside them, the clay fine enough for the flame to shine through (from £20, anjalubach.com).
Be warned: once you start buying porcelain, tea from a clunky, massproduced mug becomes unthinkable. At the first signs that you may be suffering from Porzellankrankheit, have a friend confiscate your credit card before you do too much damage.
The White Road: A Pilgrimage Of Sorts by edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus, £20).