Joining the tea set

It had to happen. Since almost everything became either ‘artisan’ or ‘curated’, conditions have been ripe for a curator of artisan teas. And sure enough, if you Google ‘tea curator’ you’ll find one promising regular infusions of ‘a curated selection of single-origin, artisan teas’.

Now Compton Verney has done the sensible thing and curated an exhibition about the stuff. The starting point of A Tea Journey: from the Mountains to the Table is a copy of a painting by Johan Zoffany showing John Peyto-Verney, 14th Baron Willoughby de Broke, taking tea with his wife and three daughters around a tray loaded with Chinese porcelain, overlooked by a gigantic silver tea urn. The urn and two tea bowls, still in the family, are on display in an adjacent case, the bowls emblazoned with the family crest.

The principal appeal of any fad, of course, is the chance to splurge on expensive paraphernalia. As early as the 8th century, the legendary Chinese tea master Lu Yu’s The Classic of Tea established the importance of the right accessories, and this exhibition features an impressive array of vessels from a Tang dynasty cup to a special Compton Verney tea set designed by the contemporary ceramicist Julian Stair. There’s also a whole case full of caddies, some with locks to deter light-fingered tea leaves. But the darlings of the exhibition are the teapots, which arrived on the scene surprisingly late after loose-leaf tea replaced the powdered sort around 1700. There’s an amusing Yixing novelty pot shaped like a bamboo mouth organ and a caneware knock-off version by Josiah Wedgwood, plus all manner of modern and postmodern variations. One of the campest is Bruce Nuske’s Chinoiserie-inspired ‘China Leaf Teapot’ (2014); to Nuske the teapot represents ‘the spouted icon and Prima Donna of the ritual of Tea… the cross-dressing engine of hospitality’.