50 Fun Facts About Pottery

Which 1955 ballad, in the Righteous Brothers' recording, plays over the pottery-wheel scene in the 1990 film Ghost?

Unchained Melody was composed by Alex North with lyrics by Hy Zaret, and Ghost uses Bobby Hatfield's 1965 Righteous Brothers vocal. The wheel scene has since been parodied in The Naked Gun 2½ and Wallace and Gromit.

Which Japanese art mends shattered ceramics with urushi lacquer dusted in powdered gold, silver or platinum?

Kintsugi means 'golden joinery', and one theory traces it to shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who sent a damaged tea bowl to China and got it back crudely stapled with metal.

Which football club, founded in 1863 among the bottle ovens that made Britain's tableware, is nicknamed The Potters?

Stoke City took The Potters from the Staffordshire pottery industry around it, having started life as Stoke Ramblers in 1863. Stanley Matthews, who grew up in Hanley, debuted for the club in 1932 aged 17.

What does 'terracotta', the name for the porous reddish clay of the Qin emperor's buried army, mean in Italian?

Baked earth, from the Latin terra cocta, is fired low enough to stay porous, so unglazed terracotta is never watertight. Etruscan sculptors preferred it to stone even for the near life-size Apollo of Veii.

Marco Polo's word for Chinese porcelain, porcellana, was the Italian name for the shell of which sea creature?

Cowrie shells share porcelain's smooth, translucent white surface, and Polo's Il Milione is the first European mention of the material, in the 13th century.

Josiah Wedgwood, who founded his Staffordshire pottery firm in 1759, was the grandfather of which naturalist?

Charles Darwin and his wife Emma were both grandchildren of Josiah Wedgwood, who was elected to the Royal Society in 1783 for a pyrometer rather than for his pots.

Which element's oxide coloured Fiesta dinnerware's orange-red glaze until the US government seized it in WWII?

Uranium oxide made every American red glaze of the era faintly radioactive, and Fiesta red returned in 1959 using depleted uranium once the Atomic Energy Commission relaxed its rules.

Wedgwood's most celebrated design, perfected in 1790, copies the Portland Vase, a Roman original made of what?

Cameo glass, not clay, is what the Roman vase is made of, and the British Museum original was smashed in 1845 by a visitor who had been drinking all week and threw a sculpture onto its case.

What did billionaire Liu Yiqian famously do with the Ming dynasty chicken cup he bought for US$36 million in 2014?

Liu drank tea from it in front of the cameras, right after the 15th-century Chenghua cup set the auction record for Chinese porcelain at Sotheby's Hong Kong, and was accused of disrespect at home.

Which Dutch city's blue-and-white earthenware was sold from about 1600 as a cheap stand-in for Chinese porcelain?

Delft potters also turned out an estimated 800 million tiles over two centuries, and only one of the original factories, De Porceleyne Fles of 1653, is still going.

Japan's Jōmon pottery, among the world's oldest, is named for patterns made by pressing what into the wet clay?

Rope pressed into the clay gives Jōmon its name, 'rope-patterned'; sherds from the Odai Yamamoto site date to about 14,500 BCE, and the pots were fired in the open at only 600–900 °C.

Athenians voting to banish a citizen scratched his name onto what, which gave the practice of ostracism its name?

Potsherds, ostraka in Greek, were the cheap, durable scrap everyone had to hand, so across the ancient Mediterranean they doubled as notepaper, receipts and ballots.

Monte Testaccio, an artificial 35-metre hill in Rome, is built almost entirely of some 53 million discarded what?

Amphorae of the 70-litre Dressel 20 type, shipped full of olive oil from southern Spain, were smashed and stacked there for about a century from AD 140.

A Qianlong vase that fetched 50 times its estimate at a small Ruislip auction in 2010 had turned up where?

In a house clearance in suburban Pinner, a retired solicitor and his mother found the 18th-century famille-rose vase; the record bidder never paid, and after two years it went to another buyer in a private sale for less than half the bid.

Which metal's oxide, imported from Persia as 'Islamic blue', coloured Ming blue-and-white porcelain?

Cobalt is one of the very few pigments that survives porcelain's firing heat, and the David Vases dated 1351 anchor the chronology of the ware.

Which Japanese tea-bowl ware, pulled from the kiln while still glowing hot, is named from a seal meaning 'enjoyment'?

Raku began when tea master Sen no Rikyū had the tile-maker Chōjirō hand-mould bowls in the 16th century, and the family is now on its 16th generation, Raku Kichizaemon XVI.

Staffordshire's Potteries city is a federation of how many towns, one more than Arnold Bennett allowed in his novels?

Six towns make up the city, and Bennett's fictional Five Towns left out Fenton, a snub that still rankles with some locals in the 21st century.

The Willow pattern, with its three-arched bridge, three figures and two birds, was invented in which country?

England, around 1790 and probably for Spode, produced the design as a transfer print, and the 'ancient Chinese legend' of the eloping lovers was invented afterwards to sell Minton's plates.

Josiah Spode's 1790s recipe owes its whiteness and strength to which unusual ingredient, about half the mix by weight?

Bone ash, calcined animal bone, makes up about 50% of the traditional bone china body alongside 25% china clay and 25% china stone, and lets it be made thinner than any other whiteware.

Which potter, whose vases feature his teddy bear Alan Measles, won the 2003 Turner Prize, a first for a ceramic artist?

Grayson Perry decorates classical vase shapes in bright colours with subjects at odds with their prettiness, and he gave the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, titled Playing to the Gallery.

The Great Pottery Throw Down began on BBC Two in 2015; which broadcaster took it over in January 2021?

Channel 4's sister channel More4 revived the show in 2020, and Channel 4 itself took it from the 2021 series, when filming moved to the Gladstone Pottery Museum in the Potteries; each episode ends by naming a 'potter of the week'.

What is 'slip', the stuff a potter trails on for decoration and brushes onto scored edges to join pieces?

Liquid clay with no fixed ratio of water is slip, and ware decorated with it is slipware; poured into a plaster mould it becomes slip casting, the basis of mass-produced figurines.

What does a potter call ware that has been through the kiln once but carries no glaze yet?

Bisque, or biscuit, comes out of the first firing; the second firing with glaze is the glost firing, and clay that is dry but still unfired is greenware.

Wedgwood's unglazed ware with white classical reliefs on a pale blue ground is known by what name?

Jasperware in 'Wedgwood blue' and white is the firm's signature dry-bodied ware, and its 1790 copies of the Portland Vase were the showpiece of the range.

Which Great Pottery Throw Down judge, once singer in the punk band The Wigs, is famous for weeping over good pots?

Keith Brymer Jones has judged since the 2015 debut, when his readiness to cry at a good pot drew comment from the first series; his 2022 memoir is Boy in a China Shop.

Pottery sherds from Xianren Cave in Jiangxi, China, the oldest known anywhere, are roughly how old?

20,000 years puts the Xianren sherds well before farming; a 2012 study in Science dated them to 20,000–19,000 years before present, older than any Jōmon pot.

The oldest known fired-clay object, from Dolní Věstonice in Moravia around 29,000 years ago, depicts what?

A nude woman, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, was fired at 500–800 °C millennia before anyone made a pot, and a 2004 scan found a child's fingerprint fired into her surface.

Which Athenian vase style of about 520 BC leaves figures in the clay's own colour and paints the background black?

Red-figure let painters draw details with a brush instead of scratching them through black paint, and the Andokides Painter usually gets the credit for inventing it.

The Euphronios Krater, bought by the Met for $1.2 million in 1972, was handed back in 2008 to which country?

Italy got it back because the krater had been looted from an Etruscan tomb near Cerveteri in 1971, not dug up in Greece; it shows the death of Sarpedon, carried off by Sleep and Death.

Which Chinese dynasty's tomb camels and horses wear the amber, green and cream lead glaze called sancai?

Tang (618–907) sancai means 'three colours'; a rare fourth, blue, came from an imported pigment and was used sparingly, and the big figures were cast in sections as grave goods.

How many complete pieces survive of Ru ware, the duck-egg blue Song court ceramic made for only about twenty years?

Fewer than 100 complete pieces exist, which is why a 13 cm Ru brush washer fetched HK$294.3 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong in October 2017, a record for Chinese ceramics.

A small dose of which metal's oxide, fired in a smoky oxygen-starved kiln, gives celadon its jade green?

Iron oxide in a reducing kiln turns the glaze green rather than brown, and the name may come from a green-ribboned shepherd, Céladon, in a 1627 French romance.

Maiolica and faience owe their opaque white ground to the oxide of which metal, stirred into a lead glaze?

Tin oxide turns the glaze white and opaque, a trick first used in 8th-century Iraq to mimic Chinese white wares, and the unfired glaze soaks up paint like fresco, so mistakes cannot be corrected.

Which Ottoman town's potters supplied the 20,000 tiles of Istanbul's Blue Mosque and perfected a bright tomato-red slip?

İznik ware used a fritware body of quartz and ground glass to chase the prestige of Chinese porcelain, then added its own tulips, carnations, roses and hyacinths.

Japanese export porcelain made at Arita is known in Europe by the name of which port, from which it was shipped?

Imari ware went from that port on to Nagasaki, where the Dutch East India Company shipped it to Europe in bulk from the late 17th century, typically in underglaze blue with red and gold on top.

Which 1956 British law killed off the Potteries' coal-fired bottle ovens, 47 of which survive as listed buildings?

The Clean Air Act 1956 pushed the industry to gas-fired tunnel kilns, and the 'bottle' in the name refers to the oven's shape, not to anything it ever fired.

Which Burslem pottery designer's hand-painted, brightly coloured Art Deco ware of the late 1920s was sold as 'Bizarre'?

Clarice Cliff first used 'Bizarre' for simple triangle patterns that hid flaws in old stock at A. J. Wilkinson, and her 1928 Crocus pattern in orange, blue and purple followed.

The French royal porcelain works moved from Vincennes to Sèvres in 1756 at the initiative of which mistress of Louis XV?

Madame de Pompadour had the new building put up near her Château de Bellevue, and the king bought the factory outright in 1759; it has been crown or state property ever since.

Which Hong Kong-born potter set up at St Ives in 1920 with a Japanese partner and built the West's first climbing kiln?

Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book of 1940 became the studio potter's bible, and his 'standard ware' range put handmade pots on ordinary kitchen tables.

Which porcelain-installation potter wrote The Hare with Amber Eyes, a 2010 memoir tracing his family's netsuke?

Edmund de Waal's book won the Costa Book Award for biography in 2010; at 17 he had deferred Cambridge for a two-year apprenticeship with the potter Geoffrey Whiting.

Picasso revived the pottery trade of which Riviera town, his home from 1948 to 1955 and where he married in 1961?

Vallauris enjoyed a 1950s golden age 'when everyone was a potter' thanks to Picasso, who also painted his mural War and Peace there and took up linocuts.

The glossy 'orange-peel' surface of Rhineland jugs came from throwing what into the kiln at full heat?

Common salt vaporises in the kiln and its sodium reacts with silica in the clay to form a glassy skin, a trick the Rhineland worked out around 1400 and Staffordshire copied by the 1700s.

Which actress, Sister Michael in Derry Girls, took over as presenter of The Great Pottery Throw Down in January 2021?

Siobhán McSweeney missed the opening episodes of the 2022 series after breaking her leg in two places, and Ellie Taylor stood in until she was back.

The potter's term 'throwing', for shaping clay on the wheel, comes from an Old English word meaning what?

To twist or turn is the sense of Old English thrawan, so throwing has nothing to do with hurling clay: the ball is centred on the turntable, then squeezed and pulled up into a hollow.

Lustreware's iridescent metallic sheen was first achieved on pottery in the early 9th century in which region?

Mesopotamia's potters fired metal compounds in an oxygen-starved kiln at about 600 °C so they reduced to nanoparticles of metal; Valencia's Manises later mastered the trick for Christian Spain.

The anagama, a single-chamber wood kiln meaning 'cave kiln', reached Japan around the 5th century from which country?

Korea sent the anagama across with its potters; inside, fly ash settles on the pots and melts into a natural glaze over firings that run from 48 hours to 12 days or more.

Which Vienna-born potter, made a Dame in 1991, paid wartime bills by making ceramic buttons for couture houses?

Lucie Rie hired Hans Coper in 1946, a fellow refugee with no ceramics experience, to help fire those buttons, and he became a great potter in his own right. She worked at 18 Albion Mews near Hyde Park to the end.

Rhineland jugs with a bearded face on the neck, nicknamed Bellarmines, were buried in 17th-century homes as what?

Witch bottles were Bartmann jugs filled with urine, hair and charms to protect the owner or harm an enemy, and the Bellarmine nickname is first recorded in 1634.

Which consort of George III, after buying a tea set for twelve, lent her title to Wedgwood's cream earthenware?

Charlotte gave official permission in 1767 to call the creamware 'Queen's Ware', and the royal endorsement turned a plain body into Wedgwood's bread and butter.

Pyrometric cones, set in threes beside the ware inside a kiln, tell the potter the firing is done by doing what?

Slumping over at a known amount of heatwork is the cones' whole job; Hermann Seger introduced them at Berlin's Royal Porcelain Factory in 1886 and Edward Orton's Ohio company took them to America in 1896.