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MUSEUM GUIDE | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA
In this series, we travel the world’s great museums through the eyes and minds of Cabana Curators, asking one question: if you had only an hour, what would you see? This week, Grace Fannon, Assistant Curator of Ceramics and Glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum, selects a series of objects that reveal the tactile beauty and layered histories contained within the museum’s unparalleled ceramics collection.
INTERVIEW BY EMMA BECQUE | CABANA TRAVEL | MAY 2025
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London © V&A Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s ceramics collection spans centuries and continents, a rich landscape of form, glaze, and surface. From vessels made over four thousand years ago to contemporary studio pieces, this collection is shaped by movement, ideas, materials, and hands across time and geography.
Italian maiolica, Chinese porcelain, Dutch Delft and English stoneware sit side by side, tracing the intersecting routes of trade, influence and invention. The history of ceramics is not isolated to one place or culture but written across a map of exchanges, migrations and encounters; the shifting currents of global history fired into clay.
Grace Fannon, Assistant Curator of Ceramics and Glass, shares a selection of her favorite pieces, explaining in her own words what each reveals about the enduring bond between beauty, function and human touch.
Bowl | Unknown | V&A Explore The Collections Bowl, 1435-1450
Bowl | Unknown | V&A Explore The Collections Bowl, 1435-1450, Málaga, Spain © Victoria and Albert Museum.
“Not only is it magnificent, but this lustreware bowl is a fascinating record of migration and trade. It was made in Málaga around 1425-1450, but its conception can be traced to the 10th century, in the Middle East. It was here that Islamic potters began to decorate their tin-glazed earthenware with metallic oxides, which we call lustre.
"The result is a shimmering iridescence that catches and holds and reflects light, as a 14th-century Persian historian wrote - “That which has been evenly fired reflects like red gold and shines like the light of the sun.” The method for creating lustreware travelled through the Islamic regions of the Mediterranean, and Málaga in Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) became a centre for its production.
"Painted in the bowl’s interior is a ship with the arms of Christian-ruled Portugal, which suggests that it was made for export. However, the dense, abstract decoration embodies Islamic visual aesthetics - the lines of the ship swirl and mimic the curves of the bowl itself. The background is filled with intricate whorls, interlacing patterns, and four unexpectedly large fish. The whole effect is one of movement. The ship almost seems to be in motion, rocking with the swell of some imaginary waves.
Waster | Unknown | V&A Explore The Collections Waster, 1650-1670
Waster | Unknown | V&A Explore The Collections Waster, 1650-1670, Delft, Netherlands, © Victoria and Albert Museum.
“Perilously tilting, this stack of earthenware plates exudes tension and a sense of being frozen in time mid-fall. A reminder of the risks involved in pottery production, this is a seventeenth-century example of a ‘waster’, a term used to describe ceramics that were damaged during the firing process. This unfortunate set of 34 blue and white plates collapsed and fused during the kiln firing.
"They were rediscovered in the Zuidergracht Canal in the city of Delft, which lends its name to Delftware: tin-glazed blue and white earthenware produced for the first time in the Netherlands. The plates reveal two converging threads of artistic and technical influence on Dutch 17th-century ceramics - blue and white porcelain exported from China, and tin-glazed earthenware exported from Southern Europe and the Middle East. They document a fusion between geographically separated cultures. At the same time, the waste evokes a violent elegance and magnetic, sculptural drama.”
Teapot | Elers, David | V&A Explore The Collections Teapot, 1690-1700
Teapot | Elers, David | V&A Explore The Collections Teapot, 1690-1700, David Elers, London, England, © Victoria and Albert Museum.
"Made in Vauxhall, London, around 1690-1700, this teapot dates to the earliest decades of tea drinking in Britain. It symbolises a turning point in the history of European ceramics, as the increasing popularity of both tea and pottery exported from China stimulated new waves of innovation in the 18th century.
“This teapot imitates Chinese teapots made in Yixing from porous zisha, or ‘purple sand’, clay. It is a rare and remarkable example of slip-cast salt-glazed stoneware, created by the Elers brothers. These two Dutch silversmiths produced pioneering, high-quality red stoneware in Staffordshire in the 1690s. While the form, the red stoneware, and the barely legible lion finial on the lid are influenced by Chinese ceramics, the trailing pattern of pale blue enamel flowers has a less obvious origin.
"It is an emblem of cultural hybridity during a historical period of globalisation. Yet a teapot is also quite a personal, everyday object – humble and sincere. Like many objects in the V&A ceramics collection, it balances a dual identity, carrying significant historical importance while also serving as a token of daily domestic ritual.”
Architectural Fitting | unknown | V&A Explore The Collections Architectural fitting, 1747-1770
Architectural Fitting | unknown | V&A Explore The Collections Architectural fitting, 1747-1770, China, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
“Trade between China and Europe in the eighteenth century was characterised by cultural influence flowing from East to West. Europeans were obsessed with Chinese porcelain, tea, and silk. Chinese motifs were adopted and frequently misinterpreted in European art.
"Yet, this Rococo-style architectural ornament is an interesting example of influence moving in the other direction. It comes from the Yuanming Yuan, a complex of palaces and Gardens north-west of Beijing.
"In 1747, the Qianlong Emperor commissioned the missionary Giuseppe Castiglione to design a series of Western-style palaces in a small section of the Yuanming Yuan. They were a hybrid mix of Asian and European architecture, reflecting the Emperor’s interest in European art. This ostentatious, swirling stoneware fragment indicates the influence of Rococo design on the palace architecture. During the Second Opium War in 1860, British and French troops destroyed the entire Yuanming Yuan.”
Dish | De Morgan, William Frend | V&A Explore The Collections Dish, 1880-1885
Dish | De Morgan, William Frend | V&A Explore The Collections Dish, 1880-1885, William Frend De Morgan, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.\
Antelopes set against dense foliage are frequently found in Persian art. The motif is replicated in ruby red and yellow lustre on this large dish, decorated by William Frend De Morgan, an English ceramicist associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.
“Like many British designers and collectors of the period, De Morgan was fascinated with pottery from the Islamic world. He was especially interested in reproducing the historical Islamic technique for lustreware, to the extent that it is said he set fire to the roof of his house in 1871 while experimenting with a kiln. This is one of his most celebrated designs: densely intricate and abstract, but carefully balanced.”
Teapot | Waal, Edmund de | V&A Explore The Collections Teapot, 1996
On the White Road plate collection, Edmund de Waal. © Victoria and Albert Museum.
“There is an almost otherworldly, enigmatic beauty to Edmund de Waal’s porcelain teapot – self-contained and bluish white. It conveys porcelain’s plasticity, the tactile way it moves and stretches under the potter’s hands.
"Fingerprints left impressed into the clay remind us not only of the teapot’s maker, but everyone who has held and touched it since. The wide looping wire handle recalls the metal mounts, spouts, and handles that were added to Chinese porcelain teapots when they arrived in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
"Edmund de Waal is part of a long history of makers, collectors, scientists, and historians who have been enamoured with porcelain: its translucency and malleability, its fine durability. This teapot is a memory of all its porcelain predecessors. It challenges the distinction between historic and contemporary.”
Etching of the Ceramic Gallery (Rooms 65-69) by John Watkins, South Kensington Museum, 1876-1881 © Victoria and Albert Museum.
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