A Book of Porcelain: Fine examples in the Victoria & Albert Museum

Rackham, Bernard, 1876-1964Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
149K words
Chapters
15

Tags

English Originals Crafts Museum CollectionsCraft HeritageCrafts ArtPorcelain ArtHumanistic CareVisual AppreciationIllustrated GuideAcademic StudyTraditional AestheticsCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Book of Porcelain: Fine examples in the Victoria & Albert Museum by RackhamAuthor: Rackham, Bernard, 1876-1964,Language: English, Class: NK: Fine Arts: Decorative and Applied Arts, Decoration and Ornament, Release Date: Jul 14, 2015

Editor's review

This book is Bernard Rackham's catalogue-style guide to the porcelain collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a product of early twentieth-century museum scholarship. Its value lies not in a general history but in using highlights of the collection to present form, glaze, decoration, and technical characteristics, while preserving the classification and descriptive conventions of its academic context. For general readers it is more like a window: a way to understand the early shape of the V&A's porcelain holdings and to appreciate the tradition of museum catalogue writing. As a public-domain e-book, the text is searchable and easy to use alongside image resources, making it suitable as extended reading after an introduction to porcelain, or for desk browsing by lovers of design and the decorative arts. Note that its dating and research conclusions are bound by their era; read them alongside contemporary scholarship rather than as sole authority.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the contents and introduction first to grasp the organizing logic by vessel type or period.
  2. As you read each object description, jot down keywords under three headings: form, glaze, and decoration.
  3. Cross-check the book's judgments against the V&A's official collection database or contemporary porcelain catalogues.
  4. Use it as a reference work, consulting it chapter by chapter rather than trying to read it straight through.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15

FAQ

Is this book suitable for readers with no background in porcelain at all? It can be read, but it is not the ideal introduction. Its descriptions of form, glaze, and decoration are fairly specialist, and readers without basic knowledge may find themselves stuck at the level of terminology. It is better to start with an illustrated general book on porcelain and then return to this one, which will make its catalogue-style approach easier to appreciate.
Can the porcelain featured in the book still be seen at the V&A? The book is based on early twentieth-century museum cataloguing, and individual objects may since have been re-registered, moved to another display, or placed in storage, so their status differs from that time. Readers can search the V&A's online collection database using the names and descriptions in the book, but should not assume that every piece is on view in the galleries.
How should I treat the book's judgments on date and place of origin? Treat them as scholarly opinions preserved in a historical document, not as final conclusions. Porcelain dating and attribution have been continually revised since the twentieth century. Read the book's judgments alongside contemporary museum catalogues and archaeological reports, focus on the descriptive information, and keep a habit of verifying conclusive claims.
Does the lack of high-resolution images in the e-book reduce its value? It does have some effect, since porcelain studies rely heavily on images. But the text descriptions have independent value as search leads and an observational framework. Readers can supplement the visual material with publicly available museum images, using the electronic text as a guide and index rather than a substitute for a plate volume.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Rackham, Bernard, 1876-1964 Author · British · 1876–1964

Bernard Rackham (1876–1964) was a British historian of ceramics who served for many years at the Victoria and Albert Museum. One work by him is held in this collection, A Book of Porcelain: Fine Examples in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a catalogue-style study devoted to selected porcelain treasures from the museum's holdings. Because public information is limited, the details of his life cannot be described at length; this work nonetheless shows that his writing drew on the museum's physical collections and attended to the shape, decoration and technical character of objects, combining scholarship with readability. Books of this kind offered general readers a direct way to approach the art of porcelain and reflect one direction in which British museum scholars of the early twentieth century organized and studied decorative arts collections.