i
So that is that. I’ve got my third white pot. Jingdezhen, Dresden and now Plymouth.
There is a tenderness about this pot of William Cookworthy. It comes into being through walking and noticing and picking things up and feeling texture, through listening intently, openly, to men working by the side of the road. It is a Quaker pot. It carries its earnestness and is unembarrassed. It is a chemist’s pot; the tin cipher on its base is beautiful and proud of where it comes from. I’m from here, it says, and there is a burr in the fall of the words.
And its whiteness is a special whiteness, too. This porcelain tankard, so smudged in execution, is a pot for angels.
My shelf is pleasingly full of pots and shards. I can move them back and forth and I should now be able to get back to making my own with real attention. There is the exhibition in Cambridge to organise. This promises a great deal of pleasure, with days looking at Chinese porcelain in the stores of the collection. And I have to pick up my pace with making for New York, too. I come into the studio very early to get a couple of hours of throwing when I can.
English Porcelain 1750–1800 isn’t part of the plan. But the truth is I simply don’t know what happened next beyond the very bare bones of the story – that the ROYAL WARRANT FOR COOKWORTHY’S PATENT was published, and that things got sticky and that Plymouth didn’t become the Dresden of the West Country. I need to find out how William reacts when it goes wrong.
And because I’ve lost my precious four pages, £95 of real money, I have to go and read The Patent humbly in a library. It is beautiful. It is the first patent I’ve ever held and it has a perfect cadenced formality. This is as it should be.
William Cookworthy of Plymouth in our County of Devon, Chemist, has by his petition humbly represented unto Us, that he hath, by a Series of Experiments, discovered that Materials of the same Nature with those of which the Asiatick porcelain is made, are to be found in immense Quantities in Our Island of Great Britain.
At this point all he has to do is wave his hands and be orotund which he does happily, scattering capital letters across the page.
The Ware which he hath prepared from these Materials, hath all the Characters of the true porcelain in regard to Grain, Transparency, Colour and Infusibility, in a degree equal to the best Chinese or Dresden Ware, Whereas all the Manufactures of porcelain, hitherto carried on in Great Britain, have only been Imitations of the genuine kind, wanting the Beauty of Colour, the Smoothness and Lustre of Grain, and the Great Characteristic of genuine porcelain, the sustaining the most extreme degree of Fire without melting; That this Discovery hath been of his Knowledge and Belief in regard to this Kingdom is new, and his own; the Materials being even at this time and applied to none of the Uses of Pottery but by him, and those under his Direction, and that he verily believes this Invention will be of great advantage to the publick. He therefore most humbly pray’d Us that we would be pleased to grant him Our Royal Letters Patent for the sole making and vending this new invented porcelain, composed of Moorstone or Growan and Growan Clay.
Then William sets his hand and seals the document on the eleventh day of July, in the eighth year of the reign of George III. And then, finally in 1770, the Plymouth Manufactory becomes the Plymouth New Invented Patent Porcelain Manufactory.
ii
I’ve put time aside for these first porcelains. And for William. I’d thought this English journey would take a summer and it is now a good year. I try and work this out, feel my way into my habitation of his aspiration. I ask him how can you be English and make porcelain? Where in this damp country can white porcelain come alive? Does it stay exotic, an import, a quixotic enterprise, or can it naturalise?
I ask myself the same. Where does porcelain belong?
You put a pot down and the space around it changes. You put groups of pots down and you are playing with much more complex rhythms. Five years after coming back from Japan I started putting my groups into buildings and museums and galleries.
My first attempt was at High Cross House, a modernist house built in 1932, with huge windows and a flat roof and an aspirational sun deck to catch the Devonian weather, gaze on the oak woods. It had tubular furniture and plywood cupboards and should have been in St Tropez. It had become an archive and the archivist was in search of projects.
I made a huge lidded jar for the great slab of a fireplace, a line of dishes to catch the rain on the sunroof. And I hid groups in the unused cupboards. You could slide back a door and find porcelain jars waiting. A critic complained that she couldn’t find the exhibition.
This was my start. I made porcelain to put amongst the shelves of poetry and along the kitchen table at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, a beautiful huddle of cottages holding paintings and sculpture, books and pots. I made huge Dragoon vases to put along a grand and stony corridor at the palatial Chatsworth. Each installation was a query for me.
I seemed to hide everything I made, put it in the shadows, around corners, in the cupboards.
iii
The Plymouth Manufactory is up and running. All the hands are briskly at work. Most of the ware is coming out clean. The saucers are mostly straight though the safeguards are still cracking, which is dispiriting, so they have come up with the rather desperate idea of making them out of pot shards stuck together, as if that would work. And they have made an experiment to see whether contracting the holes which lets the flame up to the roof of the kiln might not help us. ‘It did not help but hurt us, however the Product of this kiln together with that of our former Experiments hath been sold for upwards of Twenty-two pounds.’
I sigh over ‘Selling your Experiments’.
This is the ‘selling your seconds’ moment. You have a sale coming up – possibly before Christmas when everyone needs a milk jug or a small vase – and potters make their income. The kiln has not behaved and you are faced with boards of pots that are almost right. They aren’t chipped. There is an odd wobble in one of the jars, and a bit of warping on the larger bowls that is quite attractive but the glazes are a little over-fired. What do you do?
You should break them up.
According to the great Wedgwood, who is having his own thoughts about the pots that go wrong – the Invalids and reprobates as he calls them – if you sand the bases down of some warped vases you can screw them to new plinths, and no one will know.
You write a card with SECONDS on it and prop it up and watch them disappear into the world.
iv
I know this moment, as I look at the glazing of the porcelains. Glaze is clothing for the clay body. I have a cracked Meissen plate from 1768 – two chaffinches on a branch, moths on the scalloped rim, a gilded edge – and it is seamless, the glaze has fused with the porcelain. Think of a glaze covering a body. The fit is couture, neither a sense of constriction, nor one of too much latitude, just easy movement.
‘WHENAS in silks my Julia goes’, I think as I turn it in my hands, ‘Then, then methinks how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes.’
I look at these pots. West Country porcelains look foxed like the pages of an old book, a little grey on the edges. They are an unspooling of lopsidedness and distortion, tiny fissures in the base where the clay has opened up during the cooling of the kiln, gaping ones where there was a making fault. There seem to be minute fragments of adherent clay. I recognise each and every imperfection in the glazing. I call them out, know them as my own. There is some running in the cobalt decoration of a tendril where one of the lads has pressed too hard with the brush and got the thickness wrong or a tongue of flame has lingered. There is pinholing, open dots like the spores under the frond of a fern where someone in the workshop has left dust on a pot before glazing it, or the heat wasn’t great enough to completely melt the glaze. And here are rivulets of arrested glaze. Too thickly dipped into the barrel? Another firing that didn’t quite reach temperature? And here the glaze has scaled off because it is too thin.
Each thing that has gone wrong is attributable to several factors, but I blame the weather.
Now you examine it, the gilding isn’t great, either.
I turn to William, quizzically. What were you thinking of?
v
The going wrong speeds up. Or perhaps, if we slow the film, many things that have been going wrong are now visible.
The Plymouth Manufactory are going to have to go back to the subscribers, as the money has run out – they have spent twice as much as they expected. As a quick moneymaker, William is going to make porcelain mortars for apothecaries.
His translation of Swedenborg isn’t yet published. He is supposed to be running an apothecary business, but I find out what he’s really up to in his notebook in the Plymouth archives, green, waxed and split. After lists of ingredients for pills there is a fair copy of a letter to the governor of North Carolina, on the nature and usage of cobalt, the black mineral that blooms blue on porcelain, makes willows, swallows, lovers on a bridge, carp rising in a pool, a butterfly on a chrysanthemum.
William has been refining cobalt blue from the ore:
black-blue glass … plainly proving that as the other Enamel Colours are from Metals, as the Green from Copper, the Black & Red from Iron, the purple from Gold, so the blue is from this semi-metal, this little Discovery makes the whole affair of Cobalt easy, Scattering that Cloud of Mystery which the wrongheadedness of the German writers hath spread over it.
William enjoys dispelling Mystery, whether it comes from China, Cornwall or from Germany, and cobalt is a tangle of suppositions and stories. Its etymology reveals this: cobalt comes from Kobold, the name given to underground spirits in Germany. They live, some stories say, not just below the surface but within the rock itself. They blow out your lamp, knock the wooden spar that holds the roof of the mine up, crumble the earth below you, steal your food, your flask of water, your pick. If you are a miner you pray for protection but they are recalcitrant, unappeasable. They entice you to extract the wrong minerals, fooling you with this seam of silvery ore, the glimmer of gold, only for you to find after you have sieved it and ground it and washed it that it is worthless. There is something in this assonance of malignancy, hiddenness and depth that rings with truth.
I’m reading this upstairs in my studio with my dog asleep at my feet. In the last couple of years I’ve started to use black glazes. I haven’t fallen out of love with my whites, but needed to see what the shadows around black pots might look like. I use cobalt in one of my favourite new glazes, a lustrous black like a midsummer’s night sky with sparks of gold, as dark as a starling’s wing. It needs only one per cent. And a little more, two to three per cent, in the denser glazes, the matt pewter-coloured glaze that we call basalt, and the new one that isn’t quite right yet, a blistering black with pits and craters like a slither of obsidian.
Cobalt stains. I have an idiotic need to feel cobalt oxide and run down to the glaze room, open the plastic box and pour a scattering of the blue-black powder into the palm of my hand, rub it between forefinger and thumb, and when I scrub my hands I still have a skeletal tracing of toxic ore that stays with me for days, as I trace William and his passion for cobalt.
The world is very big for this Plymouth chemist, I realise. He holds Cathay and Carolina as he crumbles the ore between his fingers. And as the start-up is running aground, this is what William is doing, crumbling ore, led and enticed further into white and blue. He treats the works as a laboratory, a testing place for ideas not as a business.
I realise I’ve spent the last bloody week thinking about cobalt.
William is happily astray.