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From Philip Wilson:

Patricia Ferguson, Ceramics: 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978  1781  300435, £45 / $75.

The aim of this publication is to introduce the rich and varied ceramics in the National Trust’s vast and encyclopaedic collection, numbering approximately 75,000 artefacts, housed in 250 historic properties in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. One hundred key pieces have been selected from this rich treasure trove, each contributing to our knowledge of ceramic patronage and history, revealing the very personal stories of ownership, display, taste, and consumption. The selection includes the following Continental wares: ‘Red-figure’ wares, Italian armorial tablewares, Dutch Delft from the Greek A factory (owned by Adrianus Kocx), Chinese Kraak ware and Dehua ware, Japanese Kakiemon-style and Imari-style tablewares and garnitures, Meissen table sculpture by Johann Joachim Kandler and tablewares attributed to Adam Friedrich von Lowenfinck, along with Castelli fayence from the Grue workshop. There are wares from the following porcelain manufactories: Doccia, Vienna, Vincennes, Sevres, Dihl, and Feulliet. English pottery and porcelain includes delftware, salt-glazed stoneware, creamware, Wedgwood Black Basalt and Etruscan ware, Chelsea, Bow, Worcester and Derby porcelain, Minton China, De Morgan, and Martin ware. And from the Americas, Pueblo ware. Many pieces are published for the first time, sometimes illustrated in their original interiors. Collectively, the selection surveys patterns of ceramic collecting by the British aristocracy and gentry over a four-hundred-year period.

Patricia F. Ferguson is an external adviser on ceramics to The National Trust, having researched their collections since 2003, and is a consulting curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She has an MA from SOAS, University of London, where she studied Chinese, Japanese, and Safavid ceramics. At the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto, she re-displayed the European galleries, curated Containers of Beauty: The Art of Floral Display and Your Presence Is Requested: The Art of Dining in Eighteenth-Century Europe, and was author of Cobalt Treasures: The Robert Murray Bell and Ann Walker Bell Collection of Chinese Blue and White Porcelain (2003).

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