By Stuart Mitchner 

Edmund De Waal’s The Pot Book is the most recent in a long marriage’s succession of birthday, Christmas, and anniversary gifts inspired by my wife’s fondness for all things Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Arts and Crafts, with ceramics at the top of the list. Another book I’ve got my eye on is related to the recent Princeton University Art Museum exhibit Women, Art, and Social Change: The Newcomb Pottery Enterprise, which my wife  enthused about after a visit a few months back. It makes some kind of serendipitous sense that our arrival in Princeton some 41 years ago coincided with the University Museum’s landmark exhibit devoted to the American Arts and Crafts Movement. In fact, the first piece we furnished our Princeton apartment with was a Mission desk we found at a flea market.

David Rago’s shop was a good source, particularly when it was still located in downtown Lambertville and Rago’s wife, Suzanne Perrault, was there to help me make the right choice, which, given the state of our finances, was usually something relatively affordable, like a tile or a book. Since quality pottery can run from the hundreds to the many thousands uness you’re very very lucky, a book chock full of brilliant images like the Antique Trader Pottery & Porcelain Ceramics Price Guide, with an introduction by Rago, is a good default option.

Of course the appeal of antique shops and flea markets is the possibility of finding something rare. One such find on the occasion of our first Christmas turned up in an Ann Arbor shop; it had some literary charisma, being an antique plate in the Charles Dickens series made by Adams (“Est 1657”), featuring an elaborately jumbled Dickensian illustration from The Old Curiosity Shop. After decades of exploring, only a few pieces from the Dickens series ever surfaced again, none of them during visits to the Tomato Factory in Hopewell or the Lambertville Golden Nugget flea market. For a time I had to make do with humbler items like Fiestaware, one anniversary quest for Fiesta butter dishes in hard to find colors taking me all the way to a shop in Mullica Hill.

The Charm of Bizarre

At a Bath antique market on our last full day in the U.K. when we had very little spending money, my wife found the piece that remains the crown jewel of her collection. When she saw the bright, boldly designed bowl with the magic words “Hand-Painted Bizarre by Clarice Cliff” on the back, it was all over. The price was £110. “Impossible,” I said. “We can do it,” she said, having tucked away some extra cash unbekownst to me. I tried to talk her out of it, but my words fell, as they say, on deaf ears. I realize now that it was a moment of truth in our relationship, an existential coming to terms with the fact that beauty is forever and money is cosmically irrelevant.

So began an education. If you’re shopping three times a year for someone whose taste you’ve come to trust, it’s a class in aesthetics taught by your better half. And nothing she’s ever fixed her sights on has charmed and disarmed me as much as the work bearing the name of “this determined  yet mysterious woman,” in the words of Leonard Griffin’s introduction to The Rich Designs of Clarice Cliff (Rich Designs Ltd). Says Griffin, “Even if she had not covered them with so much jazzy color, just the shapes of her teapots, vases, and fancies are themselves a celebration of imagination let loose.”

According to another Griffin book, Taking Tea with Clarice Cliff (Pavilion), she was influenced by two folios of vividly colored pochoir prints by French artist Edouard Benedictus whose “brave use of color was something she took to heart.” You can see online that she more than took it to heart, she reimagined it into English countryside settings both familiar and surreal, whimsical and cozy, where storybook cottages sit on storybook hills with oranges and blacks and blues as bold and bright as colors seemed in childhood and placed with a child’s disregard for reality’s logic.

Judging from the auction prices online, the bowl my wife found in Bath for $140 U.S. in 1987 would sell for thousands now (the most paid for a single piece by Cliff appears to have been £39,500, in 2004). A July 9, 1999 article in the New York Times with a silly head (“Jolly Pots in Hot Colors Are Back”) suggests that Mick Jagger “helped put Cliff back on the radar screen” when he bought a gaily colored Age of Jazz centerpiece she designed.

Enjoying Talavara

All that remains of our Fiestaware is a $20 replica of the butter dish I ventured to Mullica Hill for (the original priced at ten times the amount). Speaking of replicas, Wedgwood brought out a line of Clarice Cliffs in 2004 that my wife’s parents gave her for a significant birthday. Although a tea set like the one in Griffin’s book was included in that Metropolitan Museum of Art present, we rarely if ever use it. What we do use at every meal is Talavera from Uriarte, most of it bought at Eyes Gallery and Indigo in Philadelphia.  Our dinner plates and coffee mugs and serving pieces are there to be used and admired and are never taken for granted. The plates are heavy and dense, combining decorative elegance and peasant solidity with an earthy downhome el restaurante glamour.

According to Talavera Poblana (American Society Art Gallery), the term originally referred to the city of Talavera de la Reina in Spain, with one theory saying that the name came to Mexico when Dominican friars in Puebla de los Angeles asked their brothers in Spain to teach them the process of making glazed ceramics. Another theory says that the Puebla ceramic tradition was named after the Spanish ceramist Roque de Talavera, who settled in Mexico in the 17th century. As users of Uriarte, we prefer to think the term comes from Dimas Uriarte, who founded a ceramic workship in Puebla under the name of Talavera de Puebla.

Iznik

At the moment we have more of the blue and white, intricately embellished Iznik pottery than we do Clarice Cliff. While Cliff evokes the family attachment to England and Talavera the same for Mexico, Iznik suggests Turkey, Iran, and Morocco. According to Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (Thames and Hudson) by Norban Atasoy and Julian Raby, “white-bodied ware decorated in blue on a white background” was developed in Iznik “a small town of only 400 households” as the 15th century “drew to a close.” My only gifts related to Iznik were the Atasoy & Raby book and The Art of the Islamic Tile (Flammarion) by Gerard Degeorge and Yves Porter. Another indispensable Clarice Cliff book is Clarice Cliff: The Bizarre Affair (Abrams), which the ubiquitous Griffin co-authored with Louis K. and Susan Pear Meisel.

The First Gift

Now that I think of it, you could say our marriage began with ceramics in the form of a wedding present of two place settings of Wedgwood in the Florentine pattern (turquoise and white, festooned with dragons) that my wife had dreamed of owning since she was in her teens, and now after 50 years of marriage we’ve accumulated enough china to serve a party of eight should that unlikely event ever come about. My fondness for our china has literary roots, since  Josiah Wedgwood’s son Thomas arranged for Samuel Taylor Coleridge to have an annuity of £150 in 1798 so that he could “devote himself to philosophy and poetry.”