Delft a good hand
A collection of rare 18th century delftware is going under the hammer
THE antiques world is full of witticisms. My favourite: two dealers are shipwrecked on a desert island. They had just one chair between them, but they both made a good living. Or more seriously: there are no pockets in a shroud. Collectors act merely as guardians of the antiques we collect, ultimately passing them and the research and knowledge we have gained about them to the next collector to do the same.
Never was this more true than in the rarefied specialist collections formed by ceramics historians such as the late Sir Frederick Edward “Ned” Warner.
A chemist and an engineer, he was fascinated by 18th century English delftware, which he started acquiring with purchases in Bethnal Green in 1952.
However, his collection began in earnest in the 1960s when, along with his second wife, Barbara, he began buying with the aim of acquiring different examples of shapes and decoration, but always with an eye to their aesthetic value.
Many pieces were sourced from sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, when the important named collections of other notable ceramic historians such as Louis Lucian Lipski, Sir Gilbert Mellor, and fellow chemical engineer Professor Frederic Horace Garner, were dispersed.
Now Warner’s collection is to be sold, giving other collectors the opportunity to take over guardianship of rare and important treasures. The sale at Salisbury, Wiltshire auctioneers Woolley & Wallis is on Tuesday, September 17.
The story of English delft (with a little “d”) starts in the Netherlands, taking its name from Delft in South Holland, a leading European centre for ceramics glazed with oxide of tin.
Chemist Warner would have known it by its real name of stannic oxide, but it’s best known as tinglazed earthenware. The glaze gives an opaque white enamel finish, which was decorated notably with cobalt blue, among other colours.
Flemish potters Jasper Andries and Jacob Jansen, recorded as arriving in London in 1567, were among the first to produce the ware in Britain, making tiles and apothecary bottles in Norwich.
By the late 16th century, Dutch Delftware was pouring in to Britain. With it came other Dutch potters who helped establish delftware factories in
such centres as Lambeth, Vauxhall, Battersea and Southwark in London and in Bristol, Liverpool, Wincanton in Somerset, Glasgow and Dublin.
Sadly for the historian, the products are marked only rarely, leaving researchers to rely on shards of broken pottery excavated from known sites as one of the few means of identification.
The range of products was extensive, including plates, wall plaques, mugs, jugs, puzzle jugs, wine bottles, posset pots, barber’s bowls, candlesticks, Toby jugs, vases and brick-shaped pots for holding flower or bulbs and wall and fireplace tiles featuring hundreds of different designs.
Other mainstays were apothecaries’ drug jars and pill slabs, sometimes plain, but occasionally inscribed with names or decorated with armorials.
If cost is no problem, look for examples of the so-called “blue dash chargers”, one of the earliest of all commemorative ceramics, made until the end of the 18th century, but expect to pay upwards of £2,000£4,000 for a decent example.
They feature naive portraits of reigning monarchs in their coronation robes ranging from Charles II and William of Orange and Queen Mary, invariably decorated with tulips, to George III, while other rare examples are decorated with The Temptation, showing Adam and Eve and the snake in the Garden of Eden.
The name comes from the characteristic dashes of blue glaze decoration, like stylised ropework, which appear around the rim of the plates, while trees and foliage are done invariably by dabbing a sponge dipped in appropriately coloured glaze.
The chargers were produced in relatively large numbers in London and Bristol and were intended purely as decorative objects to be displayed on dressers and the appropriately named delft racks.
The Warner Collection spans three centuries, the earliest piece being a London delftware relief-moulded La Fécondité (Fecundity: the ability to produce an abundance of offspring)dish dated 1638, depicting the seductive Venus reclining naked, attended by frolicking putti.
One of the earliest dated examples of this purely decorative type of ware made between 1633 and 1697, they are said to be derived from the ceramics of French Huguenot potter
Bernard Palissy (1510-1589).
Illustrated in Michael Archer and Louis Lipski’s book Dated English Delftware, the dish is recorded in Warner’s records as having been purchased at Christie’s in 1975 for 500 guineas. It is estimated at £8,000£12,000 this time out.
Sir Frederick Edward Warner (1910-2010) was born in St Pancras and educated at Wanstead National and Bancrofts Schools in Essex. He graduated in chemistry from University College London in 1931, subsequently carrying out a post graduate diploma in chemical engineering.
In his first job at a chemical works in East Stratford, he noticed the odd effects that chemical vapours were having on his colleagues, who were later diagnosed with methylation.
This fuelled a life-long interest in risk assessment and ensuring the health and safety of people working and living in high risk areas, an interest that was to see him serve on many future government committees and important international projects. Eventually, he and Herbert Cremer established Cremer and Warner in 1956, working on problemsolving at large-scale chemical production plants and on the issues of air and water pollution.