The Pleasures of Collecting

by Gardner C. Teall

And how many others there are of us who succumb to this same passion! Pottery and porcelain have, I think, more devotées in the temples of antiques and curios than almost any other of the household gods. Clay feet we know them to have, but we display their shrines!

Dutch delft is one of the sorts of pottery that is especially dear to the gatherer of things ceramic. Its popularity has brought it to be uncommon, but if it is true that twenty years is, as statisticians say it is, the average time for a collection to rest before it comes upon the market again, we may take comfort in the fact that opportunities for picking up old delft are not vanishing. We have only to lie in wait for them, to be courageous in competition and alert in interest.

No faience has crept more winningly into literature than this to which the quaint, quiet little city that lies between The Hague and Rotterdam has lent its name. Here William the Silent dwelt and here he met his tragic death. Here in the little church is the tomb of Admiral van Tromp. Here, too, the Prince of Orange came to live. Knowles says:

With the advent of the Prince and the foreign missions, with their extensive retinue of servants, came increased wealth on the top of Delft’s own commercial and industrial prosperity. It did more; it brought the cultivation of artistic feeling and luxury, and a number of distinguished men of foreign culture and tastes—rich, sumptuous, money-spending, arrayed in costly brocades, moving in elegant carriages; notables and magistrates from neighbouring provinces and towns—all with a train of officialdom pertaining to their rank, with the strict precedence and etiquette, and the ceremonies of the times.

The requirements of the well-to-do households of Delft gave encouragement to the potter’s art. The Dutch were well acquainted with the enameled and glazed pottery of Italy and of Spain. Such maiolica ware undoubtedly inspired experiment. With the importation of the Chinese blue-and-white porcelain—probably all that came to Europe at that early period passed first to Holland—the distinctive faience we know as old Dutch delft came into making, but it assumed distinctive qualities immediately, differentiating it from either the porcelain of China or the white-ground wares of Italy and Spain.

Some one once said to me: “I wish I could begin to collect real old delft, but I am afraid it is so difficult to pass judgment on pieces that without an expert to turn to constantly I should find my cabinet full of spurious ware. Mr. Antiqueman tells me it is very difficult to tell a piece of genuine old delft, unless one has had the years of experience he has had with it.” Happening to have a slight acquaintance with this Mr. Antiqueman, I did not find it difficult to understand why he chose to throw such mystery around the subject. Personally I think too many antique men lose more than they gain by so zealously guarding those trade secrets that are no secrets at all.

Once to know old Dutch delft is never to forget it. The knowing of it is not a difficult matter, once it is explained and one has contact with a genuine piece as an object-lesson.

In the first place, old Dutch delft is a pottery, not a porcelain. Pottery is always opaque, while porcelain is always translucent. Break a pottery object and it will be seen that it was formed of a baked clay base glazed or enameled over with a substance that has given it a coating which does not seem to be incorporated in substance with the base. Break a porcelain object and you will discover that all the way through it appears of a translucent substance. Old Dutch delft of the earliest sort was composed of a soft, friable, reddish clay base. Dutch delft of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a body base of yellowish or pale-brown color.

These bases instead of being glazed were coated with an enamel-like slip. Tin entered into the composition of this coating and this tin-enamel gave it a surface which I should describe as densely opaque, with a metallic feel but without the metallic lustre, for instance, of the maiolica wares of Italy and of Spain. The surface of old delft is absolutely different from the glazed surface of porcelain, of modern pottery.