FPS LIVING ROOM LECTURES

The French Porcelain Society launches a series of weekly online lectures starting with Errol Manners, former Chairman of the FPS, on redwares in princely collections. We hope this will be the first of many more!

Lecture: THE MYSTERY OF REDWARES IN PRINCELY COLLECTIONS – Errol Manners

Time: Saturday, 2nd May 2020, 19:00PM London, UK (BST)

Members will receive an email invitation with instructions on how to join the online lecture. If you want to join, please contact us for more details on FPSenquiries@gmail.com.

THE MYSTERY OF REDWARES IN PRINCELY COLLECTIONS

Errol Manners

This talk seeks to explain why the most illustrious princes of Europe were avid collectors of certain apparently humble red and other earthenwares. It explores the origins of these wares, the medicinal and even magical properties ascribed to certain rare clays from antiquity, through the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth century.

It will look at how the Ottoman sultans controlled the digging of the revered clay of the Greek island of Lemnos, Terra Lemnia, and look at the treasured vessels formed from it.

It considers how the long-established appreciation of other clays in the Mediterranean, the Iberian Peninsula and in the German world created an appreciative market and fascination with the Mexican redwares of Tonalá and attempts to explain the high prestige in which they were held in the Hapsburg dominions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their presence in Kunstkammer across Europe along with the Yixing wares of China and the Böttger stonewares of Meissen.

Image: Tonalá, Mexico (one of a pair). Probably a gift from the King of Spain for the wedding of the Infanta Margarita to Leopold I in 1666. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna