June 12th, 2009

Visit to Koerner Ceramics Gallery

Ending on June 5th, with its two-day Austen Angell Symposium and including the 2009 Annual Meeting of the International Committee on Glass, the American Ceramic Society's Eighth PACRIM Conference has been and gone. Surprisingly, a visitor to the Vancouver region can encounter ceramics in other unexpected places on the tourist trail as well. The old cement kiln at the magnificent Butchart Gardens near Victoria B.C. is one such place: the Gardens were once a disused limestone quarry, after all. The unexpected place I want to report on here, though, is the Koerner Ceramics Gallery, a wing of the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), situated on the grounds of the University of British Columbia, a remarkable find among the startling totem pole sculptures of Canada's Pacific Northwest.

The Koerner Collection contains approximately six hundred examples of European Ceramics ranging in date from the late fifteenth century until the early nineteenth century. The several styles on display in the collection - e.g., Italian maiolica, Anabaptist faience, Hafnerware, stoneware, Delftware - all developed separately, but with several points of contact over time. Tin-glazed earthenware began in Baghdad in the ninth century, but the later addition of tin oxide to a lead glaze produced a whiteness and translucency similar to Chinese porcelain, which the Europeans were unable to achieve before the eighteenth century, making do until that time with Ming designs painted on tin-glazed earthenware.

Italian maiolica: The Koerner Collection has eighty pieces of Italian maijolica, varying in date from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In fifteenth century Florence, the sculptor Luca Della Robbia used the white tin glaze on statuary. It could be applied thin enough not to 'blur' the fine detail of the sculpture and the white surface of the glaze could also be painted upon. In the largest Italian centre, Faenza, the whiteness of the glaze was emphasized and the painting confined to coats of arms on the rims of tableware.

Anabaptist faience: (one hundred pieces) Italian potters introduced tin-glazed earthenware northwards into Switzerland, Germany, Central Europe and Holland, some later becoming Anabaptists in Slovakia and Protestant Moravia. Their distinctive tin-glazed faience vessels were initially made to austere design rules. Their US and Canadian descendants are now known as Hutterites.

Hafnerware: (seventy-five pieces) This style is customarily associated with the tiles used to construct stoves. The progress of tin glaze was much slower in German-speaking countries where high-relief lead glazes were well established so it was not until flat-surfaced tiles became popular in those countries that it took off as a stove cladding.

Stoneware: (eighteen pieces) This style followed the German tradition of applied and moulded relief ornamentation; hard, resonant, and non-porous, much closer technically to porcelain than tin-glaze. It was later overshadowed by European porcelain and inexpensive faience.

Delftware: (thirty-five pieces) This is the name given to earthenware made chiefly in England and at Delft (Holland). The term is used synonymously with maiolica and faience.

Tin-glazed reached its popular zenith in eighteenth-century Europe and the Koerner Collection has more than two hundred pieces. French faience tableware came to be used by all classes of society. A more "porcelain-like" look was achieved in mid-century Strasbourg when the method of painting onto the raw glaze and then firing was replaced by enamel painting on a glaze previously fired, with subsequent final firing at a lower temperature ("petit feu"). By the end of the century the availability of cheaper and finer European and Oriental porcelains and the influence of the new, more durable Wedgwood creamware ended the dominance of maiolica and faience.

The Koerner Collection takes us up to that point in the history of European ceramics. It is certainly worth a visit by any ceramics-oriented traveler in Western Canada.

Jeff Sellar

Reference: University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology Note # 30 (author: Carol E Mayer)