Can one collect teapots? Don’t they all look alike? And wouldn’t a whole lot of them together look simply grotesque? A year or two ago there was an exhibition in London of a collection of teapots in all the best eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century wares. They were not perfect specimens —most of them had a chip here or a crack there—and they had evidently been got together by somebody with a good deal more taste and intelligence than money. But the whole show looked most attractive and clearly showed, first, that there is nothing at all monotonous or grotesque about a collection of teapots, and secondly that it can be made into an interesting and beautiful decorative feature of your house.

How is this to be done ? Well, a teapot, like a vase or a statue, is an “all-around” thing, and benefits from being looked at from all sides. Indeed many of them need to be looked at from all sides. So your pots ought to be on open shelves, and I am going to suggest that you get one of those “dividers” now popular in modern rooms. It could well go into a featureless corner of the room, jutting out, say three or four feet from one wall at about the same distance from the other.

Antique Collector MagazineIf the corner is a dark one, so much the better, for this is a collection which will benefit from artificial light artfully arranged by the amateur electrician. The shelves need to be no more than nine inches high, and if you can run to glass ones, so much the better.

Now for the teapots themselves. First, that idea about all teapots looking alike. After you have been looking at teapots in shop windows for a while—and I certainly advise a long look at them before you begin—you find that not only are they not alike, but they come in quite fantastic variety. Furthermore, the fact that they are all teapots somehow emphasises their differences—like men in uniforms.

To prove this let us run through just a few of the kinds one can find in the shops just now. First there is the little red stoneware pot, whose ancestry goes back to the beginning of tea-drinking in this country. These pots, in one shape or another came here from China with the early consignments of tea in Stuart times, and they were the first to be imitated by English and European potters. Known as Yi-hsing pots, after the place in China where they were first made, they are said to be the finest ever for brewing tea in. An original one will cost you a lot of money, but many variations of them have been made, some to be hadfor only shillings.

Another early pot, also from China, and much imitated by Wedgwoods, Spode, Rockingham and others, is a little brownware one which looks like a sawn-off piece of log. It has a “crabstock” handle and spout, and one example is said to have been young Josiah Wedgwood’s masterpiece i.e., the piece made to mark the end of his apprenticeship.

If you are going in for any of these eighteenth-century teapots, even the earthenware ones, you have to make up your mind about cost. As already suggested, if you don’t mind a crack or a chip, you can buy them for a few pounds. But if you want perfection then you will have to dig pretty deeply into your purse and think of them as an investment. This applies particularly to those delightful little pots in saltglazed stoneware, with applied white decoration or painted in enamel colours, which contrast wonderfully with the drab clay. They can be in the shape of houses or animals, but I find the square or hexagonal ones the most attractive. Just as expensive are the wares with coloured glazes such as were made by Whieldon and Wedgwood in his younger days. I call them “fruit and veg” and they often come modelled as cauliflowers, pineapples and othergreengrocery. Cheap imitations of them have been made since, and in fact many can be found which have been imported from Portugal in the last fifty years.

If you want to collect these early wares you must try to find a teapot in cream-coloured earthenware—”creamware” as it is popularly called. This is one of the most entrancing ceramic materials ever made, and any amount of chipping or crazing never quite destroys the charm of one of those little pots with a buttered-coloured glaze enamelled with Chinese style or flower painting in those extraordinarily happy tints of blackish red, green or purple.

There is a splendid variety, too, in the shapes of handles, knobs and spouts, and a piece can often be attributed to Leeds or Staffordshire on the strength of a certain sort of intertwined handle or a shell-shaped spout. Very rarely one comes across a double pot, with a handle and a spout on both sides, so that the pourer could offer either “green” tea or Bohea, according to taste.

While you are in this area you also ought not to overlook the charming Castleford and Prattware teapots, which have a family resemblance, but whereas the former are usually decorated in lively yellows, blues and other colours, the latter are as a rule sparingly picked out with a blue or a chocolate line.

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