Winner of the 2017 American Ceramics Circle Book of the Year Award
The aim of this publication is to introduce the rich and varied ceramics in the National Trust's vast and encyclopedic collection, numbering approximately 75,000 artifacts, housed in 250 historic properties in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. One hundred key pieces have been selected from this rich treasure trove, each contributing to our knowledge of ceramic patronage and history, revealing the very personal stories of ownership, display, taste, and consumption.
The selection includes the following Continental wares: "Red-figure" wares, Italian armorial tablewares, Dutch Delft from the Greek A factory - owned by Adrianus Kocx - Chinese Kraak ware, Dehua ware, Japanese Kakiemon-style and Imari-style tablewares and garnitures, Meissen table sculpture by Johann Joachim Kändler and tablewares attributed to Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck, Castelli fayence from the Grue workshop, and wares from the following porcelain manufactories: Doccia, Vienna, Vincennes, Sèvres, Dihl, and Feulliet.
English pottery and porcelain includes delftware, salt-glazed stoneware, creamware, Wedgwood Black Basalt and Etruscan ware, Chelsea, Bow, Worcester, and Derby porcelain, Minton China, De Morgan, and Martin ware.
And from the Americas, Pueblo ware.
Many are published for the first time, sometimes illustrated in their original interiors. Collectively, the selection surveys patterns of ceramic collecting by the British aristocracy and gentry over a four hundred year period.
About the Author: Patricia F. Ferguson is an external adviser on ceramics to The National Trust, having researched their collections since 2003 and is a consulting curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She has an MA from SOAS, University of London, where she studied Chinese, Japanese, and Safavid ceramics. At the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto, she redisplayed the European galleries, curated "Containers of Beauty: the Art of Floral Display" and "Your Presence is requested: the Art of Dining in eighteenth-century Europe," and was author of Cobalt Treasures: The Robert Murray Bell and Ann Walker Bell Collection of Chinese Blue and White Porcelain (2003).
