TEAPOTS, TUREENS, TABLESCAPES

Going Back In Time With Chinese Art

Two years after the Atlanta History Center opened in 1926, noted Atlanta architect and Georgia Tech grad Philip Trammell Shutze built a house next door, the Swan Coach House, that has become a focal point of the West Paces Ferry property.

A man of exquisite taste, a prodigious collector and an eccentric, Shutze is the now the focus of the center’s exhibit “The Mandarin Shutze: A Chinese Export Life” that features a sampling of the porcelain, art and furniture he collected after retiring in the late 1940s.

Shutze was the architect of many large and beautiful homes, but he never owned a house of his own. In 1958, he settled in a two-bedroom apartment on Peachtree Street and filled every room with a collection big enough for a museum. He liked to make use of the centuries-old treasures that he collected, sitting in 18th century chairs and using a 200-year-old pot as an ashtray. He didn’t cook but owned a 340-piece dinner service that he stored in the dishwasher, the guest bathtub and the never-used stove.

The exhibit includes some rare pieces, among them a pair of boar’s head tureens made in China in 1763. Had Shutze filled them with hot soup, he would have seen steam rising from the boar’s nostrils.

To bring the exhibit to life, museum curators have re-created Shutze’s apartment with the original paneling, his favorite chair and one of his elaborate table settings. Shutze preferred martinis over tea, but nonetheless he collected teapots. More than 30 of them are on display, most of them manufactured in China and Europe at the end of the 18th century.

The exhibit also explains the difference between porcelain and pottery, and how both are made. A companion to the show is the Philip Trammell Shutze Architectural Drawings collection. More than 490 of his drawings are digitized and available to browse online. n atlantahistorycenter.com/exhibitions/mandarin-shutzea-chinese-export-life • @atlantahistorycenter

EVENTS BY Gillian Anne Renault