English ceramics - Current and Coming - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

During what must have been a very active twenty-five years of retired life, Harold S. Keller collected some five thousand pieces of English and European porcelain that he bequeathed to the Brooklyn Museum of Art at his death in 1998. Keller was an attorney and a lifelong resident of Brooklyn. The museum received the collection in 1999, and Barry S. Harwood, curator of decorative arts at the museum, has recently installed approximately one hundred pieces in the American decorative arts galleries.

Given the size of the collection, on average Keller could have purchased two hundred pieces per year--an astonishing accomplishment. He concentrated on examples made during the heyday of the aesthetic movement m Britain between about 1870 and 1900. During these decades artists, designers, and craftsmen were swept up by the influence of Asia, particularly Japan, which had only opened up to trade with the West in 1854. Thereafter the flood of Japanese goods into England and Europe was received with astonishing enthusiasm. Among the imports were decorative objects such as fans, uldyo-e prints, screens, and pottery and porcelains.

The Keller collection is particularly rich in works made by the Worcester Royal Porcelain Company whose designers were not only inspired by Japanese forms and decorative motifs but also by the techniques used by Japanese potters. A display of Japanese art at the International Exhibition of 1862 in London enabled British designers to see a wide variety of this material These decades were also marked by a great interest in superior craftsmanship in reaction to the many slipshod wares mass produced since the onset of the industrial revolution.

Among the highlights on view are a series of so-called dragon jugs, each of which is different in size, decoration, and glaze. Assembling such a group is an accomplishment only a single-minded collector like Keller could have achieved.