The agateware teapot

Saturday I sat at in our rented room and watched a bladesmithing video by the lady whose forge I built my seax in.  When the video completed, the next one up was about building an agateware teapot.  That was an intriguing title, so I watched that one as well.  Twice, whereupon I determined to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum here in London where the potter filmed her process.

Arriving at the V&A, I garnered a map of the exhibits and took the lift (the English don't use "elevators.") to the fourth floor which opened up to furniture.  Well, I love working wood, so I tarried in that hall and fell in love with the chairs of Orcadian David Kirkness, a gentleman who lived and worked between the middles of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  

"Orcadians" are those Scots who live in the Orkney Islands north of the mainland.  Isn't that a lovely word?

Kirkness's chairs are structured primarily of pine (it's cheap), less often of oak.  Sometimes they're stained - as opposed to being painted-, and he basically made only three models.  The backs of the chairs are oat-grass straw woven into cords joined with twisted grass stringing.  The strings attach to the structure of the chair through drilled holes; the path to the hole is sunk below the level of the frame so the grass string won't be worn apart.  Exquisite design consideration.

Some of his chairs have storage boxes or drawers beneath the woven cane seat.  If the drawer has a pull, it's of cast brass.  Kirkness would build the wooden parts of his chairs in his shop and farm them out to the local crofters to weave together the seats, backs, and tops.

The diminutive size of these chairs drives home how much smaller people were a century ago.  They are elegant in their simplicity of construction, cleanliness of design, and use of materials to hand.

I loved them.

Then I watched a video of marquetry involving wood veneers, pewter, brass, and horn.  Beyond the glorious craftsmanship displayed were my discovery of the sawdog used by the furniture makers and the fact that the polishing process included several steps of polishing -with sticks of  charcoal.  Not only did the abrasion of the charcoal buff the brass and pewter to a high luster, the grains of charcoal knocked loose in the process both hid the saw kerf between the materials while simultaneously introducing a pencil-line of demarcation.  It was genius.  I don't know -how- I'm going to import that into my woodworking; I do know that I -will-.  The sawdog was a fixed frame to keep the fretsaw in a constant line at a constant angle while the sawyer simply powered the saw through the layup of wood, brass, pewter, and horn.

Tearing myself eventually from this showroom, I emerged into the ceramics gallery, which was my original destination, in search of yesterday's agateware teapot.

This museum does not have a collection of anything; it has  COLLECTIONS.

In the ceramics gallery the museum's pieces are shelved on glass in four-sided glass cabinets a meter wide, a meter deep, two meters high.  It felt like the displays covered acres.  Old stuff.  Modern stuff.  Ancient stuff.  New stuff.  Utilitarian stuff.  Representational art.  Abstract art.  Grunge art.

My focus bleared; it was overwhelming.  I could only saunter, stroll, meander, wander.  I read the identifying labels only of pieces which especially caught my eye, and there were a myriad of those.  I am fond of small clay oil lamps, the type of lamps whose wicks wise virgins trim before  marriage feasts.  There were two shelves of them, lamps, not virgins.  Each shelf held at least forty lamps.  I gawped like the provincial I am, not the sophisticate I strive to be.  

There were entire table sets of blue-and-white ware, red-and-white ware, polychrome ware, basins, plates, bowls, ewers, lavers, bottles, cups, steins.  There were life-sized busts of Roman emperors, each wearing richly-patterned toga and tunic, each wreathed in laurel and oak leaves, each on a plinth that set his eyes and face above my own, ensuring the viewer realized his own insignificance.  There were Mesoamerican deities and clowns, Abyssinian deities and clowns, Egyptian deities and clowns, Greek and Roman deities and clowns.

But no agateware teapot.

Drained of energy, I sank into a chair before a stainless steel console urging me to "Search Our Collection."  I searched our collection.  "Agate Teapot" yielded two images, neither the pot I sought.  "Teapot" coughed up nine hundred and forty.  Great Caesar's Ghost! In columns of three!  Lordy!  I spun the roller ball mouse, and the images began to scroll left-to-right in shapes, details, and colors I could only barely conceive. But . . . There it is!  Room 138.  Case 5.  Shelf 6.  I inked that into my red spiral and looked up to see an angel docent approaching with that most wonderful of questions: "Can I help you find something?"

Yes, ma'am.  Please. How can I locate Room 138, Case 5, Shelf 6?

"Why, Room 138 is right through this doorway."

Thank you.  How do I identify the cases and shelves?

"This number on the right is the case number; these on the left are the shelves."

Oh. wow.  Thank you.

There were three agateware teapots huddled together like a clutch of quail's eggs, but I identified the one I sought.  It is the one to the left in the photo.

I continued to wander, lonely as a cloud, another fifty feet or so before I acknowledged my head was full and my brain's temperature gauge was edging into the red OVERTEMP area.

I took the stairs earthward and caught glimpses of treasures worthy of a pharaoh, of an emperor.  But I kept my steps steadfast on the path to the door.

I will say only the museum store, not even the bookshop(!), was a department store of delight, but I escaped.

Lunch was the (small) fish and chips at the Sherlock Holmes Pub on Northumberland Street, down from the Mall and from Charing Cross station.  

I -did- find the Admiralty building where Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander protagonists) had their different meetings, but that's a different story, because Life is Rich and Full and Good.

The link to the "how I made it" video is right here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6QZRFs76Yk