National Museum Cardiff
Arcanum: Mapping Eighteenth Century Porcelain
It is nearly 300 years since the ‘arcanum’-the
secret of making porcelain-was rediscovered at Meissen
in Germany. It is difficult now to appreciate the huge
impact this had. Porcelain was a material with many meanings:
not only a status symbol and a sign of fashionable taste,
but also a diplomatic tool and a marker of technical progress
and economic strength. Porcelain spread to all the countries
of Europe.
This is an exhibition that draws on the vast and significant
porcelain collection of a Victorian Welsh banker Wilfred
de Winton. Its scale was extraordinary: between 1890 and
1910 he purchased 6000 pieces. De Winton organised his
collection along very specific ‘scientific’
lines, ordering it according to decorative taxonomies.
He attempted to map the evolution of shapes and decorative
motifs across the century, as well as their transmission
across Europe.
When De Winton gave his collection to the Museum a special
three-storey gallery was built to house it. It was recognised
as one of the premier collections of its kind, but as
its prestige faded the collection was dispersed to a store
and to glass cases on the balcony. It is now in the process
of being reinterpreted and redisplayed in new cases.
All museum collections have different lives. This exhibition
was a personal view of De Winton’s collection. I
chose specific pieces to reveal various stories from the
collection, and chose to display them in very particular
ways. I also made two new installation pieces for this
exhibition which reflected my interest in de Winton’s
collection of eighteenth century porcelain.
