Ceramics

I first met Jonathan Garratt two years ago. We were travelling to a festival and had failed to find anywhere for lunch, so the sign ‘cream teas’ as we drove through a village proved irresistible.  I had been looking for some pottery to sell in the shop for some time, but hadn’t been able to find anything that felt right, but when I saw Jonathan’s pottery in the shop next door I knew that this was the potter I had been looking for. I ‘phoned him, music blaring in the background, and arranged to go and see him the next day. He lives in Dorset in an 18^th century thatched house with barns, in which he has built his kiln, surrounding a beautiful planted courtyard. I came away with a carload and have been selling his pottery ever since.

 

So it is always a pleasure to visit him and see what he has been making and I went again this Friday, forgetting that it was the first of the big summer holiday travelling weekends! So I arrived hot, tired and very hungry, but was greeted with his usual hospitality and a perfect summer lunch of mackerel with a wonderful salad of his homegrown vegetables. After that and a tour of his vegetable garden I felt completely restored.

 

On that first day that I visited him we quickly discovered that his father had been a dealer who knew my father and as they did the same fairs, I recognized his name, but couldn’t really remember him.

He has just made the sculpture you see in the photograph using his father’s shoes as moulds for the line of feet, which Jonathan has used to suggest the ongoing generations and which is an expression of hope and optimism on his part. Unfortunately the courtyard at Town House is too small to include his sculpture, but it works beautifully punctuating the planting in his courtyard.

 

The journey home was just as horrendous, but the couple of hours with Jonathan and his wife and the new things I brought back made it all worthwhile.

I bought these 19th century wine cups from Hungary recently, attracted by the wonderful patterns and colours and by the obvious years of use. I always fall for blue and yellow and especially stripes. One has been so cherished that the words ‘ restored in 1963’ have been carefully written on the base and I have visions of this being handed down, father to son as a family heirloom – apparently they are still treasured today. It makes me think of the inns and smaller drinking places that form such a colourful part of the long lost world of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s extraordinary travelogue that captivated me last year, a world of rural life that probably ended each day with one of these in the hand.

I set off early on Wednesday morning: up at 5am in France (4am as far as I was concerned), to go with friends to the ‘brocante’ at Le Mans. I hadn’t been to it for a long while– it’s not much fun going on your own, struggling up at that time of the morning, driving for an hour and a half and then fighting for a parking space in the middle of a muddy field, so I was looking forward to going with the others. Of course once we arrived and had a quick cup of espresso to warm up, it was down to work and then you’re on your own: unspoken etiquette demands that you separate and go your own way to avoid the difficulties of everyone wanting the same thing. So it’s first come first served until the initial rush is over and then everyone meets up for another coffee and to compare notes.

I’m told that I’m very fussy about what I buy…..and there were lots of attractive things which, on the whole, weren’t as outrageously priced as I had expected. But it has to be something I love, for one reason or another and this dish from Provence was one of them. Partly it is the shape; I have two plates in the shop at the moment with the same glaze, so I was pleased to find a serving dish. Then there is the colour: such a suggestion of summer warmth against which any food would look good. But one food sprang to mind as soon as I saw it – asparagus. It’s not only that English asparagus is delicious, but the fact that it is only around for such a short time heightens my anticipation. And it is soon followed by broad beans, peas and all the other harbingers of summer. More than anything else though, it is the fact that asparagus would look perfect against the warm yellow of this glaze. If I haven’t sold it I’ll take a photograph to show you.

One day, going shopping in Islington, I passed a small shop that I had no idea existed. It was shut, but some china in the window caught my eye and, although I don’t know much at all about 19th century china, it hooked me sufficiently that I returned the next day. This time it was open and I was told that the china that had taken my fancy was some ‘gaudy welsh’. You may well have heard of it, but I hadn’t and it seemed an unusual use of the word ‘gaudy’, so I looked it up. It originally meant ‘brilliantly fine or gay, showy’ and although it has now come to have the sense of being overdone and tasteless, the original word immediately struck me as completely appropriate: the joy the artist had so obviously taken in the painting of the design made the tulips dance across the surface of the china.
It turned out that the shop was closing down that day, so if I hadn’t been so determined to go back the day after I had seen it, I would have missed my ‘gaudy welsh’; I took that as a sign and kept one piece for myself.

Since I have changed the shop to become less of an antique shop and more a space selling a mix of things that I like, I have been on the lookout for some pottery to sell. Then in September I happened to be in a village in Dorset (having a cream tea I have to confess), when I found some work on sale there by Jonathan Garratt. So I phoned and asked if I could visit him and was amazed by what I found. He lives in an eighteenth century house which, with its barns, encloses a paved courtyard full of plants, colourful garden pots and decorations of varying shapes and sizes. Beyond lies the garden where he keeps his chickens, grows his fruit and vegetables and stores the wood he is drying (ready for chopping and using to fire the kilns he has built himself).

Jonathan studied archaeology and is also the son of a dealer (who by an extraordinary coincidence, knew my father), so the ancient forms of cooking utensils inform the shape of much of his pottery and the colour and surface pattern is heavily influenced by his love of African textiles. I had a wonderful time in his showroom barn surrounded by his amazing array of shapes colours and came away with a selection of mugs, bowls and jugs for use, but also some larger pieces. They are in the shop now, so I hope you will come to have a look if you’re passing.