Pottery Tales in Victorian Painting and Literature

I had the pleasure of attending the Robert and Marian Cumming Lecture on Monday at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. The lecture, by Dr. Rachel Gotlieb focused on pottery in Victorian art and literature and it was an interesting and engaging event that was very well attended (a full house). I had a few colleagues who could not make it to the lecture, as it was a wet dark cold evening, so I decided to write a small review post about the lecture, highlighting the main points of the talk.

            Dr. Gotlieb is in the process of writing a book on ceramics in the Victorian era in terms of metaphors and meanings and I very much look forward to reading it when it is published. Her lecture focused on how ceramics function as a mode of codifying experience in the Victorian era. She started with, William Nicholson’s The Hundred Jugs (1916) ,which was a good way to segue into a discussion on the form and function of jugs. The discussion turned to the relation of cracked jugs and fallen women and also how these jugs are described in the narration of Victorian novels like George Eliot’s Adam Bede. Dr. Gotlieb highlighted Edward Corbould’s Hetty Sorrel and Capitain Donnithorne (1861) as a visual representation of a focus on jugs and jug breaking in Adam Bede. In these art pieces there is an emphasis on intact jugs representing wholesomeness, where the opposite (cracks or chips) represent lack of virtue..

            The detail present in the art, especially in pieces like Lilly Martin Spencer’s Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the Lasses (1856) is elaborate, such as basket-shaped earrings. A tulip and sunflower jug is the focus in Spencer’s piece and this is a common jug seen in many Victorian paintings said Dr. Gotlieb. Another interesting piece discussed is George Elgar Hick’s Woman’s Mission: Comfort of Old Age (1862) which highlights English china and it’s relation to the dutiful daughter as well as a connection to taking care within/of the empire.

            One of my favourite moments of the lecture was when Dr. Gotlieb highlighted the work of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Brontë, and Anthony Trollope as having many jugs within the narration that symbolize love and hope but also cracks and shattered jugs as being indicative of larger instances of lack of virtue. Seeing passages on the screen from novels that I have read many times and yet I did not notice the prevalence of the jugs in the texts as I was reading them at the time was a great reflective moment. I started thinking about how our own research interests tend to obscure our ability to see other symbolic aspects (i.e. I can tell you a whole bunch about hands and tactility in Eliot, Hardy, and Brontë, not so much about plates or jugs) and it had me thinking about what else I had missed.

There is also polyvalent symbolism of ceramics in a single piece of art. For example, James Collinson’s Answering the Emigrant’s Letter (1850) has at least 10 different types of ceramics present which position the family in the painting not only in terms of class and employment, but also historically in a moment. Collinson also continues this theme of ceramics as historically codifying in Home Again (1856) where the broken egg shells on a plate are symbolic of the soldier who has just returned from the Crimean War.

            However, not all uses of ceramics are as heavily symbolic. For example, in Frederick George Cotman’s One of the Family (1880) the ceramics, specifically the brown jug, are used to draw the eye into the painting says Dr. Gotlieb. The other highlight of the lecture for me was the reference to the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, specifically Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt and their use of ceramics. Ending with Holman Hunt’s Honest Labour has a Comely Face (1861), Dr. Gotlieb’s lecture left the audience with a lot to think about and left me with many avenues to explore in my own research as well as a desire to look for the presence of more ceramics in Victorian literature and art as they relate to the sensory.