COLUMN – Living with Blue and White

Living with Blue and White

BY SUSAN MOORE

A friend and fellow art critic once asked me if I had any luxuries of life – pleasures that had nothing to do with cost but took time and effort. His was the luxury of a real fire in his bedroom – well worth the heaving of logs up several flights of stairs. Mine, I replied, was crisp white linen - a pain to launder - and old table glass and porcelain that had to be respectfully hand-washed after use. Nothing has changed over the decades – except for the quantity and variety. Even so, the glass remains English, the porcelain, Chinese.

This taste for export porcelain emerged and evolved, I now realise, out of paintings. Its roots were an early fascination with the PreRaphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and that great Aesthete, his friend and neighbour James McNeill Whistler. Their passion for blue and white – ‘Nankin’ or ‘Old Blue’ as they called it – was legendary, and it lined their Chelsea homes. If Whistler could describe those ‘curious’ paintings in cobalt blue ‘the finest specimens of Art’, these ceramics were obviously worth serious consideration. For a student in London, the British Museum and V&A could not have been more obliging in terms of their collections. Without consciously deciding to do so, I began to pick up the odd piece as opportunity and funds allowed.

As I made a home, these chance purchases turned into ‘harlequin’ sets of plates and bowls of similar shape, size, and pattern. I saw no need for anything to match perfectly – and rather rejoiced in the fact that they did not. For some reason it was harder to find blue and white coffee cups and saucers - or perhaps I was simply impatient – so even this parameter was relaxed to embrace Qianlong famille rose of wildly varying decoration and quality. Oscar Wilde once quipped that he found it harder and harder to live up to his ‘blue china’. My humble specimens were definitely to be lived with.

Perhaps it was Dutch and Flemish still-life painting that bought me to the rummers. Thought to derive from the Dutch or German roemer, these English vessels appealed by being sturdier and more capacious than the more elegant 18th-century wine glasses. It was certainly northern still-life paintings that opened my eyes to the possibilities of magical juxtapositions of colour and texture in the presentation of food.

No one coming to dinner has ever found half-peeled lemons uncoiling in elegant scrolls beneath a Wanli dish a la Willem Kalf or Jan Davidsz. de Heem-style lobsters dripping over the edge of the table, but they may well have found the likes of mounds of fraises des bois in small Ming blue and white bowls. Nothing could be simpler, but what eye could fail to delight in such a spectacle? As every good cook will testify, the battle of the table is won by pleasing all five senses – beginning with the anticipatory pop of a cork and scrunch of starched linen. Slowly the eye takes in the gleam of silver against dark wood, the play of reflections in flickering candlelight, the colour, texture, and scent of flowers… All of this before tasting a thing. If anything, the visual feast only gets better as a meal draws to its close with the arrival of velvety fruits and variously textured nuts - in yet more blue and white vessels - and the richer, deeper hues of sauterne or port. These pleasures are more than the sum of their parts.

Looking around the house, I also realise how many of these blue and white wares have escaped from the table. There are bowls filled with pot pourri, lidless tureens repurposed as jardinieres, saucers as soap dishes and ashtrays – not that anyone uses them these days. Added to the mix were Kangxi jars from the family, their lids long gone, and inevitably transformed into lamps (but happily not drilled). In a way that is hard to define, blue and white has a neutrality that allows it to belong anywhere and everywhere – like a pair of blue jeans, it does not seem to clash with anything. When a kind friend gave me an 18th-century provincial blue and white dragon dish, for instance, I flourished another and immediately set them down on the chimneypiece nearby where they have remained ever since. There they sit perfectly at peace under a 16th-century Madonna and Child and either side of an ancient Roman glass unguentarium, flanked by Egyptian alabaster, polished ammonites some 146 million years old, and a jaunty contemporary seated wire woman who, like one of de Heem’s lobsters, balances on the side of the ledge.

This belief in the ability of blue and white to look at home anywhere is also a legacy of the English country house where every room is in effect a palimpsest revealing the taste, and acquisitions, of successive generations of a single family. It is a relaxed, embracive and above all tolerant way of living in a house, a much-emulated style of decorating - if that is what it is - where even the grandest of interiors may exude an easy informality deriving in part from a sense that most of their contents, however eclectic, have grown comfortably old together. Perhaps the only thing gratifyingly not welcomed in this historic mix of old and new is frigid perfection.

Even as a younger generation pares back the plethora of clutter to give their homes a more graphic, architectural feel, swapping faded glory for bold colour, this aesthetic lives on almost everywhere in town and country house. The basic rules of engagement have not changed. As the late and much-lamented decorator cum antiques dealer Robert Kime would always say, every good room begins with a rug. It also must have Chinese porcelain.

‘Every good room begins with a rug and it also must have Chinese porcelain’

Susan Moore writes for the Financial Times and Apollo, and founded the not-for-profit Slow Art Workshop in 2017.