A terrible beauty

Good pottery appears to be cool and silent — something vulnerable that, with luck, can outlast many human generations. A white porcelain dish seems calm and decorous; one knows that skill went into its evenness, into the exact whiteness, into its lightness. But when I began to think about pots I had no idea of the extreme violence, happenstance and risk that are an intrinsic part of the maker’s art. The chemistry is complex; the potter needs to study it intimately — the composition of different clays, of glazes, of rare and valuable pigments (cobalt for instance), and of the firewood that makes the fire.

Pottery-making can be poisonous from fumes, and tasting deadly dyes. The history of the art is littered with terrible disasters. The Martin brothers laboured for whole years on kilns full of splendid work and lost it all in explosions or meltdowns. The physics is charged with trepidation and violence too. In the 16th century Bernard Palissy strove to find a way to make Chinese white porcelain — he was a great potter and scientist — and failed. He stuffed his furniture and, it is said, his floorboards into a kiln to keep up the heat, and nevertheless failed.

Edmund de Waal is a man with a vocation — or, as it turns out, two or three interlocking vocations. He tells us that he knew he wanted to make pots from the age of five. One strand of this book is an account of his own work: discoveries, failures, changes of direction. Of these the most important was his rejection of the post-war orthodoxy about the virtues of ‘honest’ brown earthenware, which had begun with William Morris, and his shift to the fineness and difficulty of white porcelain. He tells us about his own early brown works: