 Hello everyone and welcome to this virtual lecture on the ceramics in Britain course. My name is Florence Tyler and I'm the curator for 19th century ceramics and glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I'd just like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre and Helen Ritchie for inviting me to give you this lecture today. Blue and white transfer printed ceramics are one of the most recognisable forms of tableware in the world and I'm sure that most of you have seen at some point a version of the plate on the top left of this slide and if not then I'm positive that after today you'll notice it cropping up around you in various places. The pattern is of course the willow pattern which is probably the best known and most widely used pottery design to have ever been made. Production of transfer printed ceramics began in the second half of the 18th century but it was in the 19th century with the development of mass production techniques that factories all over the country began to make blue and white transferware in a wide variety of patterns and styles that are now synonymous with British design. For over a century Britain was the leading manufacturer and exporter of transferware supplying these household goods to a mass market who could afford this good quality but inexpensive type of tableware. The title of this lecture is blue and white in 19th century Britain and beyond and the main focus is blue and white ceramics made in Britain but to understand the development of these objects and why blue and white as a colour combination was so popular we need to look beyond Britain at the global context in which these pieces were made. So we'll first look at the history of blue and white in ceramics starting with Chinese porcelain and its huge influence on potters around the world and from there we will examine the origins of British blue and white how the transfer printing process revolutionised ceramic industry and we'll look at some of the best known and most successful transfer patterns produced in the 19th century. I'd also like us to consider the global impact of these quintessentially British ceramics they were extremely popular and were exported into homes across the world and copied extensively and then finally I want us to look beyond the 19th century right up to the present day in order to acknowledge the remarkable persistence of blue and white printed tableware not just in a domestic context where they continue to be used but also as politically and culturally charged objects which have been used by contemporary artists in their work. So there is quite a lot to get through in half an hour so this will be a bit of a whistle stop tour of blue and white ceramics and I've mostly used objects from the V&A collection to illustrate the lecture and I've included the museum number of each object in the image captions so if you'd like to look at any object in more detail afterwards you can use that number to look at the objects on the V&A's online collections database. To understand why blue and white tableware was so popular in Britain in the 19th century we must first look at the origins of blue and white ceramics to see what it was that British potters were trying to emulate and recreate in their production of blue and white and it was potters in China who were the first to use cobalt blue oxide on a white porcelain ground and during the Yuan dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries Chinese potters refined their porcelain clay and used cobalt blue to hand paint elaborate and elegant designs on plates, vases and other vessels taking advantage of the dramatic contrast that could be created using deep shades of blue on a pure white ceramic body but the colour blue was also favoured on a purely technical basis as painters would work directly onto the unfired clay body before glazing and cobalt blue was a colour that could withstand the very high firing temperatures needed to make porcelain and it gave the most consistent and reliable results in those firing conditions so blue and white porcelain was produced in China in large quantities in the centuries that followed and it was exported around the world to the Middle East, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and eventually to Europe so all the objects here were made in China in the city of Jingdezhen which is famous for being a major centre of porcelain production up until the present day the first is an early example from about 1320 the striking dragon plate is from the late 16th, early 17th century and then we have a very typical Chinese ginger jar and as I mentioned, ceramics like these were exported and traded around the world and in fact the tea bowl and saucer at the end were found in a shipwreck off the coast of Vietnam that was full of Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen, destined for South Asia and Europe and we know that from the 16th century Chinese porcelain was present in the collections of the aristocracy in Britain and after the Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 Chinese ceramics were made specifically for export to Western clients and were traded into Europe in large quantities and we have to remember that at that time China was the only country that could produce porcelain so these objects held a mysterious fascination in the West and as a result it was mostly elite and wealthy individuals who could access it potters in Europe began to exploit this taste for blue and white porcelain by making their own versions in the materials available to them in the town of Delft in the Netherlands and in Britain potters copied Chinese designs often derived from Chinese porcelain but using earthenware which is a less refined and rougher clay covered in a tin glaze in white to give the impression of white porcelain and hand painted in cobalt blue so here are a few examples of this imitative Delftware you can see the designs are very similar to the style of the Chinese pieces we saw on the previous slide particularly with the large bars in the middle and here we have this wonderful waster from the V&A's collection this is a pile of Delftware plates which have slipped during the firing process in the kiln and therefore the plates have fused together into one rather magnificent sculptural object and you can see from the pieces of the Delft that the edges of the clay are rough and they have a brown tinge rather than white which is a giveaway that these are earthenware, not porcelain and I love this object, I always think it's a great object to look at because you get the sense of drama and unpredictability that comes with the making of ceramics and the kiln firing process and at the same time it gives it a really good impression of the large quantities of Delftware that were being produced to satisfy this desire for blue and white ceramics after much experimentation during the 18th century factories in Europe finally figured out how to make porcelain themselves first at the Meisen factory in Germany and soon after in France and England and in London they were able to make porcelain themselves England and in London the bow factory began to make blue and white porcelain in the popular Chinese style from 1747 and here we can see a coffee pot from this early period and certainly later we have a dish and a small mug painted with a dragon design quite similar to the Chinese dragon we saw earlier and a Chelsea plate from 1755 and it was around this time that the first experiments in Britain were taking place into a new method of ceramic decoration whereby the decoration was printed onto ceramics instead of painted and it was this development in technology which would go on to totally transform British ceramics and enable mass production on an unprecedented scale Worcester was the first factory to successfully decorate porcelain by printing designs under the glaze in cobalt blue oxide in the late 1750s and here are some examples of Worcester's transfer printing and I hope you can see the difference in nature between this decoration and the previous objects that we've looked at which were all painted the decoration here is much more dense and precise there's less of a sense of movement because there aren't any freely applied brush strokes and instead you can just make out the lines of the engraving in the printed image and for example in the bowl at the bottom you can see that the border sections are much more uniform and are done in a way that could not be achieved by painting this is a slide just to explain the actual method of transfer printing and you might have been told this in a previous lecture so apologies if this is repeating something you already know there are a few different methods but essentially the design is first very skillfully engraved onto a copper plate and then the colour in this case cobalt blue oxide mixed with printing oils is applied to the copper plate so that the colour sinks into the grooves of the engraving and then a sheet of very thin but strong tissue paper is pressed onto the copper plate to absorb the colour and then when you peel away the tissue paper you're left with the design and where the engraving is deeper more colour collects there and the design is therefore darker in those areas the tissue paper is then cut out and applied directly onto the ceramic object leaving the coloured design on the surface the paper is washed away and the piece is glazed and fired and one of the key benefits of this method is that paper is used to transfer the design and because paper is flexible and can bend that means you can apply it to rounded surfaces so it's perfect for ceramics and to enable the designs to fit onto these curved surfaces the prints were often applied in different sections with the border separate to the main design and that's what you can see in the fourth image there and I think it's worth mentioning that even though this is a mass production technique as you can see here it still involves a lot of human skill in the process and I think it's worth remembering that when we look at these objects particularly in the engraving of the copper plates which were incredibly detailed and well executed and this is a wonderful object we have in the collection which is a trial platter so here we can see one section of a design which has been applied many times to test exactly how much of the blue colour to apply and as you can see there are slight variations in the depth of colour in each printed section and it's worth noting that just like in China working on porcelain again in this context cobalt blue oxide was the most reliable colour to use for transfer printing under the glaze and therefore was used the most it was the calfley factory in Shropshire who really exploited this new technique to the full printing became their main type of decoration and they were the first to use a printed name backstamp on their wares and calfley produced an extensive range of underglazed blueprints on porcelain here are a few examples all in a shinwazery style and you might notice that three of the images all show the same design which is the fisherman pattern this was the most commonly used and it was copied by other factories and this illustrates another advantage of transfer printing which is that we have several different objects here and different shapes but all bearing exactly the same design with none of the natural variation that you might get from hand painting so finally it was possible to have whole sets of tableware all with a uniform design and pieces could be decorated at speed and a cheapness that was previously not possible it wasn't until about a decade later in the 1780s that potters in Britain began to successfully transfer print onto earthenware and it was Josiah Spode in Staffordshire who really perfected the technique and brought it to market in the late 18th, early 19th century predominantly using pearlware of which is a type of earthenware with a paler white body and transfer prints were well suited to earthenware because the dense decoration helped to mask any imperfections in the clay body and it became the go-to tableware for most of the 19th century these wares were more affordable than porcelain and therefore they were accessible to a much wider market Spode responded strongly to the influence of Chinese landscape designs and was often asked to match Chinese pieces for customers who had damaged some of their originals and here in the middle we have the buffalo pattern which was one of the early shinwasery designs but the most famous pattern as I mentioned at the beginning was the willow pattern on the left the design was developed by Spode who was inspired by an original Chinese pattern but there is no Chinese pattern that contains all of the features of the standard willow so it is an English invention it was first launched in 1790 but between 1790 and 1880 70 different factories were known to produce the pattern in Britain so on this slide I've just brought together lots of versions of the willow pattern from the V&A's collection to show you how popular and enduring this design is the first is from 1818 and it has the name Thomasine Wiley inscribed on the front who was from a Cornish family that supplied cobalt blue to potters in Staffordshire then we have the Bellevue pottery in Hull a minton bone china plate with a small willow vignette in the centre and right up to a plate made by Churchill in 1991 and a video game version made a few years ago by the designer Ollie Moss and the key elements that you can always identify in the willow pattern are the pagodas, the bridge with three figures the trees including of course the weeping willow the boat and the two birds flying in the sky and I'll just deviate from the V&A's collection briefly to show you this cake stand or possibly a stilton cheese stand every self-respecting curator of the 19th century should have their own piece of willow and here is mine which I'm very fond of and I wanted to include this because if you look closely you can see where a section of the border has been chopped up to fill in a gap so that it all fits properly so where the red line is there the two border sections don't match up and this shows how transfer prints were being used and reused on different objects of different sizes they weren't always designed specifically but the borders are so dense and detailed there's so much going on that it doesn't really affect the overall visual effect you'd only notice if you look really closely so it's a very clever design in that sense and that's partly why these transfer prints were so successful and so versatile the willow pattern became quickly embedded in British culture it helps significantly by a fictional story that was written about the pattern in the mid 19th century and which was often repeated and the story goes that the figures on the bridge are two lovers who are hiding from the girl's father who doesn't approve of their love so they try to run away but they are caught and sadly killed but their souls are transformed into the two love birds at the top who fly away together and the willow pattern is spread into other media as well here are a few examples from the BNA collection we have two sections of a wallpaper designed in willow and it's quite nice to see a bit of colour a break from all the blue and white at the bottom is a silver earring so you could actually wear the willow pattern and the bottom left is from our word and image collection and it's a flower pot cover so you could buy a standard flower pot and then wrap the cover around it so it looks like you have a willow flower pot and in more recent years the willow pattern has been used by contemporary artists and designers who have played with its familiarity and its iconic status but also used it to look at the relationship between Britain and China in relation to art and industry and these plates are all by Robert Dawson who has worked with the willow pattern since the mid 1990s and you can see here how he distorts the pattern and he's extracted the individual motifs playing without expectations and our process of recognition and here are just a few examples of the willow pattern that I've just seen in the past few months that is a window of a hardware shop that I walk past most days near where I live and see if you can spot the plastic willow plate on the shelves and there's a tea set which I saw in an antique shop an Instagram story that came up with a willow plate I do see the willow pattern used a lot on food accounts on social media and lastly that is a very dramatic entrance to the Adrian Sassoon Gallery at Sotheby's in London created by the ceramic artist Balka de Vries who works a lot with found objects and broken ceramics and here he's used these enlarged fractured shards of the willow pattern to create this very striking entrance to the exhibition and I've just put this slide here to show the contemporary relevance of this historic material it's all around us and it has such a special and nostalgic quality that I think it will never quite go out of fashion so I've focused so far on the Chinese influence and the shinwazery but transfer printing was a new type of visual media that enabled any kind of image or print that would usually be seen in books or hung on walls to now be transferred to ceramics and disseminated to new audiences in their homes so a variety of print sources were used as the basis of designs and the majority of these were landscapes of different kinds often presented in a very idealised way and depicting not just English and European sites but also those of faraway lands such as India and for many people who weren't able to travel this was how they would first receive their ideas and understanding of these foreign places here we have some examples the Spode Tower pattern on the left was an incredibly popular pattern it was in production from around 1814 until the Spode factory's closure in 2009 and it depicts the bridge of Solaro near Rome and it's based on a printed illustration from Merigo's publication Views of Rome and its vicinity published in the 1790s and next we have two more Spode patterns from the Indian Sporting series introduced around 1815 the patterns were drawn from prints in a publication called Oriental Field Sports which depicted various hunting scenes so we have the dead hog in the middle on the Turin and you can just about make out the poor hog being speared in the middle and then we also have the death of the bear on the plate and you can see the Indian Elephant in the background and these stimulated interest in India and in life there this is an amazing object we have in the museum it's a jug made by Bourne Baker and Bourne in 1830 and it depicts a lovely landscape around Nanaham Courtney House in Oxfordshire and the reason it's so special is because of its size which unfortunately you can't really tell in a photograph but it's huge, it's almost a meter tall and it was made especially for the London showroom of the China and Glass dealers so it was really a one-off kind of show-off piece to showcase British blue and white transfer wear and finally this is the Blue Italian pattern it was originally made by Spode in 1815 and it became one of Spode's most famous and best-selling patterns and this example here was actually made by Zachariah Boyle another Staffordshire factory and it's quite an unusual design in that it combines a European classical landscape scene in the centre with a floral chinoiserie border taken directly from a Chinese original and it was a huge commercial success for Spode and even though the Spode factory closed in 2009 the brand was bought by the Port Marion Group and they still produced the Blue Italian pattern today and a couple of months ago I did see these shelves full of Spode's Italian in the homeware section of TK Max in Brixton so that's one place you can go in the future to find a piece of timeless British design and seeing those reminded me of this work we have in the collection by the artist Paul Scott and Paul Scott has done a lot of research into transfer wear and its history and he uses it in his artistic practice often using found objects and adapting these traditional designs in order to confront difficult subjects and this piece is called Spode works closed casserole 2 and it is a dish in the Blue Italian pattern that he found discarded at the Spode factory after it closed and it had been damaged in the firing process so Scott refired the piece to preserve the layer of dust and dirt that had accumulated and he added gilding to the damaged areas and in so doing he's sort of transformed it into this very poignant memorial of the factory symbolising both its success but also its solemn final moments as a working factory and this is another piece by Paul Scott called the Cockle Pickers Willow Tea Service and he made this in response to the Morecom Bay cockling disaster in 2004 when 21 Chinese cockle pickers tragically drowned from an incoming tide and the service was made to commemorate 200 years since the end of the transatlantic slave trade and serve as a reminder that modern slavery is sadly still happening in the 21st century so we have a very powerful and serious message on what are traditionally seen as quite harmless domestic objects and Paul Scott has recently launched a line of tea ware for Fortnum and Mason called the Gardens of Lyra where he's collaged together different prints from the Spode Archive including ones we've looked at today so have a look for that online if you are interested so not only did transferware become an important part of British life but it also played a role across the Atlantic in building American identity and after the Anglo-American War ended in 1815 British factories were keen to restart their export trade to America and began to produce patterns specifically for the American market that would appeal to patriotic consumers there so Staffordshire Potters used illustrations and prints from North America to make patterns for creating important American buildings, historic events political figures and so on even if these were anti English in sentiment so on the left is an example probably made by Enoch Wood showing a male figure paying his respects and admiring the tomb of America's founding father George Washington and in the middle we have a commemorative jug that celebrates the return of General Lafayette to the United States in 1824 and Lafayette was a Frenchman who had fought against the British in the American War of Independence and became a close friend of George Washington and finally we have a plate with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad pattern celebrating this relatively new technology and the pattern is taken from a British print source but has been given an American interpretation and on the back with the Enoch Wood stamp is also an American eagle beside a shield of stars and stripes and you might have noticed that all of these glazed in a much darker blue not found on typical British transferware or any of the objects we've seen so far and this was a style that was thought to appeal to American taste and was made specifically for export it wasn't just North America a blue and white transferware was exported across Europe to Australia and even back to China and Japan where they began to make blue and white transferware to export to England so in the end blue and white essentially did these big loops all around the world back to where it started and production became so widespread in Britain that later in the 19th century these types of mass produced objects were criticised and there was a renewed interest in the antique Chinese porcelain which had inspired them and this was mostly down to the aesthetic movement led by the artists Whistler and Rosetti who believed that ham painted blue and white Chinese porcelain embodied true beauty and they triggered a new wave of blue and white obsession in Britain amongst the growing middle classes which was known as Chinamania and people in Britain began to eagerly collect Chinese porcelain and display it in their homes sometimes in huge numbers and one of the most famous examples of this was patron Frederick Richards Leyland who was a shipping magnate from Liverpool and he amassed a huge collection of over 300 pieces of Chinese blue and white porcelain and he housed them in a custom built display that you can see here in his dining room in London and the room was lavishly decorated by Whistler amongst much scandal and drama in an elaborate green and gold peacock theme and you can see the room here in its current location in the Frear Gallery of Art in Washington and at the V&A we have had an exciting exhibition on called Filthy Luca Whistler's Peacock Room Reimagined which is a dramatic immersive contemporary installation by an artist called Darren Waterston who recreated Whistler's famous Peacock Room but in a very unsettling way in a state of decadent demolition as the artist puts it and the show was extended to the end of November but obviously the museum is now temporarily closed again but if you'd like to find out more about the artwork and Chinamania and the passion for blue and white porcelain in the 19th century then the accompanying publication is on sale in the V&A's online shop and I've written more about it in there so I hope this has given you an understanding of the history of blue and white in ceramics and the significance of British blue and white transfer wear and how this fairly humble tableware which can often be described as quite old fashioned or kitsch is actually really so important in the history of British industry and design and his end are just the two most recent blue and white acquisitions that have come into the ceramics collection two rather lovely 19th century garden seats made by the Minton Factory that I was very pleased to acquire for the museum so thank you so much for listening and goodbye.