MR. GLADSTONE ON CERAMIC ART.
PROFESSOR RUDLER, F.G.S., delivered, on Saturday last, before the Cymmodorion Society, at the London Institution, a lecture upon "The History of the Potter's Art in Britain," which seems to have been chiefly remarkable for the opportunity it afforded Mr. Gladstone of express- ing his views upon Ceramic Art generally, of which oppor- tunity he availed himself at some length, though he apologised to the audience for his brevity. From the birds of Australia, to the Homeric potter's wheel, paying a graceful tribute by the way to Dr. Schliemann, who was present, and thence onwards to British pottery, the sentiment of beauty in the Celtic race, a eulogy upon the Wedgwood manufactures, a few words about forged marks, an anecdote or two about Karl Thdodor tea-pots, a quotation from Shakespeare, and a compliment to the Welsh nation, were easy transitions for so practised a speaker ; and we feel sure that Mr. Gladstone would have found no difficulty, had he wished it, in weaving the Japanese Ambassadors or the Turkish misrule into his subject ; but the real gist of his speech was not this pleasant gossip about things in general, but a claim, which he set forth with much ingenuity, that "the fictile art of pottery is directly a branch of fine.art,—as truly a branch of fine-art as the art of the sculptor or that of the painter." Such are Mr. Gladstone's own words. He sustains this theory by maintaining that while the representation of the human figure is the crowning-point of fine-art, there are in the manufacture of porcelain certain specialities serviceable for this representation which do not exist elsewhere. These specialties are two in num- ber,—first, the power of combining groups of figures ; and secondly, the power of applying colour freely. Now, that porce- lain is capable of being used for fine-art we do not imagine could be denied, and that it has occasionally been so used is indisputable, but the part of Mr. Gladstone's speech which appears to us to be moat open to question is his method of sus-
taining the claim of the porcelain manufacture as a branch of fine- art,—its aptness for rendering the human figure. It is true that these specialities exist in some measure, but they are not exclusively confined to porcelain, nor are they sufficient, as we shall endeavour to show, to compensate for other drawbacks, which are inevitable from the nature of the material. In the first place, with regard to the free use of colour, which Mr. Gladstone asserts cannot be applied equally to ivory or marble. It seems to us that this assertion, besides proving very little, is open to question. We have seen ivory carvings in Japan painted (or rather stained) as elaborately as ever was Dresden shepherd, and even in our own time we have had a tinted Venus from the sculptor's studio. But the great and as we think insuperable objection to porcelain as a means of representing the human figure is the Inevit- able diminution of size which it requires. Mr. Gladstone himself says that "the limits of size in dimension in porce- lain appear to be fixed by a law of nature." We are not sure that we quite understand what he means by this "law of nature," for surely there can be no reason why porcelain figures should not be made more than twenty-four chches high, which is the largest size he would admit of, but it appears to us to be a matter of history that the human figure has, speaking broadly, never been represented at all in porcelain, otherwise than in the most con- ventional way, and when we compare such representations as the China shepherd and shepherdess of Sevres or Chelsea, with any second-rate work in bronze and ivory, we are compelled to acknowledge the utter inferiority of the human element in the manufacture.
We cannot call to mind at the present moment any porcelain manufacture where the human figure has been modelled in a way at all comparable to sculpture, and it would appear to be almost impossible to model so minutely in clay as to produce in a figure, say, ten inches high, any representation of a man of six feet which should compare with sculptor's work. Even should such modelling be possible, it would, we think, fail to be success- ful, from the appearance of wasted skill it would involve ; for we might have had with the same amount of skill, instead of this minute porcelain figure, which we put under a glass shade on our mantelpiece, a duplicate of the man himself in plaster or marble. Nor does it appear to us to sustain Mr. Gladstone's view that it is possible to put six or eight figures together in porcelain without offending the eye. He says that to the sculptor in marble it is almost impossible, but we would ask,— why is it impossible ? Not because be is a sculptor in marble, but because his work is really a branch of fine-art, and must be judged as such ; whereas in a porcelain group, the qualities which determine its preciousness are not (or at least, are certainly not chiefly) the harmoniousness of its curves, and the flow of its lines, and its artistic composition, but the quality of the porcelain, the fineness of the glaze, the renown of its manufactory, and the rarity of its rivals. It seems to us that porcelain cannot be called a branch of fine-art till it is judged by the same rules as are applied to fine- art in general,—that is, to painting and sculpture ; and whatever porcelain manufacture may become in the future, in the present and the past it has not advanced beyond graceful prettiness. In speaking thus we are speaking only of its solid representations of the human figure, on which Mr. Gladstone relies for its claim to the name of fine-art ; in some other direc- tions, it has advanced quite into that region. There are probably no delineations of the human form at once so graceful and so true as those upon many of the Etruscan vases, and the repre- sentations of sea-weed, shells, and fishes in high-relief by the French potter, Palissy, are certainly worthy of the name of fine- art. it is a curious fact that Art seems to have flourished in pot- tery and died in porcelain, and that, too, in almost every country where both manufactures existed ; by this we mean that where the two manufactures remain for us to compare them, we find that almost universally the pottery is imbued with a true artistic spirit, and the porcelain is not. For instance, the most beau- tiful specimens of ancient ceramic art which remain to this day are the common glazed tiles and dishes of Persian manufacture, and the majolica of Italy ; if we take Germany, we find that, beginning with the Cologne stone-ware in the fifteenth century, right downwards to the date of the foundation of the Dresden manufactory, in 1706, all the designs for the pottery are superior in real artistic feeling, to any of the porcelain figures or vases which succeeded them. In the same way, Pass), in France, in the six- teenth century, excelled in real feeling for and artistic reproduc- tion of nature, any of the far more highly-educated and skilful workmen, who produced, a hundred years later, the fragile por-
celain of Sevres. So in Japan, likewise, the best designs are almost invariably those upon pottery, and to come back to England, the only really artistic ceramic manufacture in the last century was that of Josiah Wedgwood, while at the present day, the manufactures of Minton and Doulton, are far superior, artistically speaking, to those of Worcester. There are many reasons which might be given for this, at first sight, rather startling fact, but the chief one seems to be that in the decoration of pottery, as a rule, workmen are more content to employ simple forms and colours, and to work within the limits to which their material confines them ; also from the, as a rule, superior size of the articles manufactured, there is more scope for free and bold design ; while, on the other hand, the delicacy of the porcelain clay tempts the workman to subtleties of execution and design such as can be really expressed only in pictures. In fact, in pottery the artist is content to indicate the object he desires to represent, while in porcelain he endeavours to -depict it fully in its natural colour, and with all the myriad details of nature.
We have been led far away from Mr. Gladstone's speech, but there is one more objection to his theory of porcelain being a branch of the fine-arts which we must notice in conclusion. This is, that we cannot give to this manufacture a similar rank to that of sculpture and painting, until it can be shown that it possesses M some degree the qualities on which they depend for their merit. Now one of the marks of really fine-art in either of these two is the delineation of emotion and action, and until it can be shown that porcelain is capable of reproducing these, it must ever remain, as it does at present, concerned with the smaller matters of nature, and not with the representative human figure. Speaking from our own experience, we have never seen a porcelain figure which even attempted to have any expression, or to appear more than a decently-dressed dolL Although we differ from Mr. Gladstone on this point of his speech, we heartily agree with him in his praise of the manufactures of Wedgwood, and we agree with him that porcelain might be a branch of fine-art, only, in our opinion, it will become so, if at all, by confining itself to the representa- tions and delineations of simpler subjects than the "human form divine."
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