Katharine Butler, The Butler Collection

Q5 QUESTIONS Katharine Butler

BIOGRAPHY

Katharine Butler is an Art Historian and Entrepreneur. She studied Art History at Edinburgh University, but chose to pursue a business career in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She founded and ran several consumer goods companies in the Czech Republic most of which she had successfully sold by 2019 when she started focussing on writing a catalogue raisonné of the Butler Collection with Dr. Teresa Canepa. In the last decade, she has been actively collecting Chinese porcelain.

kbutler@butlercollection.com

1. What do you most admire about Chinese ceramics?

I love holding ceramics. Often they combine extreme fragility with great structural integrity. I like to feel the unglazed clay, sometimes smooth like soap and sometimes gritty and rough. I love the fact that it takes movement to appreciate the whole piece and when you hold it, you can feel the weight distribution of the clay.

2. How did you become involved in the world of Oriental Art?

Rather to his own surprise, my father put together the finest collection of 17th century Chinese porcelain in the world. I was brought up with the pieces around me and drawn in by my father’s increasing interest in the scholarship of the period. Although their iconography was at first alien, the beauty of the designs and the elegance of the shapes always attracted me. Around 20 SIR MICHAEL BUTLER years’ ago, I made up my mind that I would learn as much as I could about our collection, knowing that I could not forgive myself if my father passed away before I had done so. Since his death in 2013, I have intensively studied Chinese art and the porcelain of the 17th century in particular.

3. In what way does art enrich your own interior?

My father built a museum to house his collection and that allows the pieces to be studied and appreciated in context. Although I do have many pieces of Chinese porcelain in my home, it seems to me that there they have lost their scholarly values and are only aesthetic objects. I prefer to see them in amongst the rest of the collection where they act like pieces in an art historical jigsaw. So in my home, I have a wide range of art, from Netherlandish tapestries, contemporary ceramics and glass objects, Han figures and European antique furniture.

KATHARINE IN THE BUTLER COLLECTION

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

4. What’s the last artistic or cultural event that really impressed you?

In March of this year, I was in New York for Asia Week and I visited the Asian ceramics collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was so impressed by the versality of their approach to displaying their collections. They frequently change the pieces in the cabinets and update the labels. Also they have created themed rooms where objects are put in context and they do not hesitate to put porcelain amongst the works in the Painting and Calligraphy rooms. One can regularly visit the same spaces and see different layouts and objects, often with stimulating or unexpected juxtapositions. It is really good to see that an institution of so great a scale can still maintain the nimbleness to allow real curatorial freedom.

5. If money, space or time were no object, which piece of art or antique would you like to have in your home?

What I love about porcelain, is that as long as you don’t drop it, it doesn’t mind being hot, cold, damp or dry. However, now assuming concerns about display and conservation are removed, as well as those of money and space, then I would love to own a misty landscape painting by the 11th century Chinese artist Mi Fu (1051-1107). I particularly covet one in the Freer Gallery in Washington titled ‘The Tower of Rising Clouds’, which ironically is probably not by the master himself. This painting was also admired by 17th century painter, Dong Qichang, whose influence can clearly be seen in the landscapes on some of our porcelain.

MI FU, TOWER OF RISING CLOUDS