The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  The obituary of Tschirnhaus is published in the Acta eruditorum. And then he disappears into footnotes, in the way that people can flare and illuminate an idea or a place and be gone. In Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels a perfect ship is sailing on as Icarus disappears into the sea. A ploughman continues his work, unconcerned. Auden gets it perfectly: ‘the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.’

  The expensive, delicate ship moves on.

  v

  It is announced that there is to be a new factory at Meissen to create this white porcelain invented by the Arcanist, Johann Friedrich Böttger.

  It is announced that there is to be a visit to Dresden in the summer from the Danish King Frederick. There will be a foot tournament emulating Roman combat, night jousting in the riding school with seventy-two participants dressed as gods, the Danish king as Mars and Augustus as Apollo. There are to be banquets that go on to dawn, a castle resting on ships moored in the river, attacked from both banks with cannons firing tracer shots, the cipher of the king of Denmark high up on the tower, the castle illuminated in various colours, a large number of images set in flames.

  I read the reports of the visit. ‘The air was constantly full of fire.’

  Chapter twenty-eight

  the invention of Saxon porcelain

  i

  Dresden is affecting me.

  My notebooks have bullet points. I write up my report card for Porcelain 1719 / Saxony / France / Netherlands / China / England, without even noticing this efficiency.

  Saxony remains pre-eminent. The Arcanum is no longer secret. It is still secretive, but there have been defections and lurings away by offers of better working conditions elsewhere. There is already a porcelain factory in Vienna. Every ruler wants his own little manufactory.

  Böttger has just died. He was given his freedom five years earlier in 1714, six years after they pulled the first white cup from the kiln. On hearing the news it is said that he ‘continually laughed and ridiculed everything’. His biographer, Johann Melchior Steinbrück, noted that Böttger thought freedom ‘consists of just following your own moods’, which seems fair enough after thirteen years of imprisonment and threat. He adds that Böttger was negligent, forgetful, loose with money, had poor health, a childish demeanour, vanity, was fearful, irrational, had moods, was jealous and lacked gravitas. And that he lived openly with his mistress in the house he had bought in Dresden like a man of importance. This is marked on my report.

  As are his epileptic fits, vomiting and dizziness from ingesting mercury, sustained carbon monoxide poisoning from the furnaces and silicosis from the dust.

  The obituaries are tough. ‘Not only in life did he experience damage, nuisance and threats, but it has also continued after his death.’ Böttger left chaos. Steinbrück’s summation was that the Arcarnist:

  didn’t like to be convinced. He was jealous … he spent lavishly when experimenting; he was indecisive and liked to postpone important things and easily went from one thing to another, often starting new things before finishing the old … He was inventive … He was vainglorious … He loved the attention … He was suspicious, but naïve … So this is the inventor of Saxon porcelain.

  ii

  Saxon porcelain continues to innovate without Böttger, without Tschirnhaus.

  The innovation has been extraordinarily rapid. The white porcelain was first shown in 1713, at the great fair at Leipzig. There were few potters who could handle this sticky white compounded clay. They had to be trained. Jewellers and turners, gilders and modellers and decorators too, had to work out how to use porcelain. The preciousness of the material, rather than its plasticity, was its most significant feature. Porcelain is a new technology, lit up by new desire.

  I have a small cup and saucer from this year, kindred to my Second White Pot. I find these very early white porcelains moving. The branch of prunus across the cup is not great, the very small leaves are a bit wobbly. It could be lighter.

  It is the kind of porcelain cup I recognise, aspirational.

  Desire changes everything. Augustus pushes, constantly. Within a year or two of this porcelain being sold this cup would have been too simple for him. It would have been decorated and gilded. In 1720, it would have acquired the two slightly curved crossed swords in blue on its base as a cipher, a trademark. It would be Meissen.

  iii

  I spend a morning in Albrechtsburg Castle, high above Meissen. This is where Böttger was imprisoned and where Augustus’ manufactory grew out of the laboratory from one cellar to another, across into rooms in the adjoining buildings, up and up through the castle until great runs of medieval halls were being used. The central hall with its Gothic vaults is partitioned off for decorators, another airy space becomes three floors to hold the store of saggars. A plan from a hundred years ago shows 304 rooms in use by the manufactory.

  It was madness, of course. The kiln rooms were an inferno. The huge walls of the castle cracked with heat. The run of rooms near the kilns were warm whilst everything else was appallingly cold. This is a castle, a cliff face of a building seven storeys high, on a bluff 300 feet above the Elbe. It is perfect for keeping secrets, but as a study in how time and motion work, how to make, decorate and fire delicate porcelain, this is incredible.

  The white clay comes down the river from Colditz, mined in the Erzberg mountains, and is carried up the hillside to the lowest of the cellars to be washed of impurities. The wood for the kiln comes the same way and is dried in sheds on the riverbank. Two pairs of horses turn a great grinding mill here for the other minerals. Wet clay is kept in another cellar and then is brought up to the throwers and modellers on the top floor, up a dramatic Gothic spiral staircase. It is a wide staircase, almost four feet across, and shallow. But try carrying a basket of kaolin up 200 steps on your shoulder. Then try going downwards and round, with a board of pots.

  Who has precedence as workers climb upwards and downwards? The sounds of breaking porcelain are commonplace here.

  Albrechtsburg is now a nineteenth-century fantasy of a fourteenth-century castle. In the 1860s, in the spirit of pride in the new Saxony, the porcelain manufactory was cleared out of the castle in Meissen where Böttger was imprisoned. It was given a clear, flat factory site in the town. It is still there. And this castle is made good again after the depredations of 150 years of porcelain making. Wall paintings of moments in Saxon history are painted: Duke Albrecht off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, triumphs in battle – ceiling bosses are decorated with coats of arms, fireplaces are re-carved, medieval tables and antler chandeliers brought in.

  Böttger is a star here. On one wall he is shown as the alchemist, the Goldmacher, open-shirted, he sprawls in a chair grasping a glass of beer and a long-stemmed pipe, wild-eyed, as arcanists stoke a fire. It is choreographed chaos. On the other wall he crouches in front of the king, a courtier in green silk behind him, a worker in the foreground, and he displays porcelain. There is a light emanating from the white cup. It glows like the Christ child displayed to the Magi.

  Tschirnhaus is given a little cartouche high up. You wouldn’t notice him in the glamour. He wouldn’t recognise all this fuss.

  iv

  The porcelain recipe is a secret.

  No fragments could be disposed of in a place where they might be gathered and studied. The quantity of waste can be measured by a huge cellar that was used as a tip for shards. The floor of the cellar rose and rose. Several years ago archaeologists in the castle found a room two metres deep in fragments.

  Once the Arcanum was lost in the late eighteenth century and Europe was scattered with manufactories, baskets of jagged, broken porcelain were tipped over the side of the hill. A landslip of white porcelain.

  Meissen becomes the white hill. It is my Second White Hill. In this cellar I stoop, and embedded in the compacted floor are crescents of white.

  C
hapter twenty-nine

  porcelain rooms, porcelain cities

  i

  It is eighteen miles from Meissen to Dresden and for Augustus the great joy of having his own manufactory so close, is that he can wave his hands, bring ideas into shape, order gifts for the congeries of people who shift and clog every entrance to the court. And because the king collects, his courtiers collect too.

  The money remains complicated, of course. There are Chinese vases that he wants from the collections of Frederick William I of Brandenburg and Prussia, over three feet tall, made and decorated in blue and white in Jingdezhen. They are not for sale, which makes them irresistible. So in 1717 he conjures a plan to exchange these vases for a battalion of 600 dragoon soldiers, pots for people. These soldiers have crossed over from Saxony at Baruth. Each monarch declares that this is a gift and no money passes hands. The eighteen vases that formed the centrepiece of this exchange become known as the Dragoon vases. The battalion take the Meissen cipher, the two crossed swords, as their banner. The soldiers become the Dragooners.

  With the quantities of porcelain arriving here, where and how Augustus displays his porcelain in his city becomes an imperative.

  I’m listening to court music from Dresden on my headphones as I walk through the city and there is a phrase played on an oboe that keeps being picked up by the violins and taken out and aired and then given back. And what I hear is a sort of return to structure, the singular becoming clearer and then becoming plural and hidden, and then re-emerging. In the beautiful phrase of the American philosopher John Dewey, describing art as process is like the flight and perching of a bird. You are in it. Then you pause and see what it is. And then back to absorption, the flight of music.

  This is at work with the feeling for how porcelain phrases build up into complex melodies, while bringing you back to single pots. This is still a recent idea as Augustus starts to arrange his great collections in Dresden, find ways of animating the thousands of vessels he is buying, the thousands he is commissioning from Meissen.

  Porzellankabinette, porcelain rooms, have currency in courts and palaces across Europe. The late English Queen Mary employed a young Huguenot architect, Daniel Marot, to create rooms at Hampton Court and at Kensington House. He has style of the more is more kind: his beds finish in ostrich plumes, his surfaces oscillate like the breathing flank of some thoroughbred animal. Chimney pieces were covered in porcelain garnitures, dishes and small vases were on brackets on every wall, pots lined the architrave where the ceiling started its curve. In his engravings Marot shows shafts of sunlight coming in, mirrors and lacquer panelling adding to the theatre, hundreds of pots becoming endless chambers of thousands.

  This manner of displaying porcelain became hugely popular, much to the fury of Daniel Defoe. ‘The Queen brought in the Custom or Humour as I may call it, of furnishing houses with China-ware which increased to a strange degree afterwards, piling their China upon the Tops of Cabinets Scrutores and every Chymney-Piece to the tops of the Ceilings and even setting up Shelves for their China-ware, where they wanted such Places, till it became a grievance in the Expence of it and even injurious to their Families and Estates.’ This seems an excessive reaction, until I remember that Defoe has some knowledge of clay. He is the owner of a failing tile works in the Essex marshes, put out of business by the Dutch. Grievance is a good word, for Defoe, policing other people’s extravagance.

  For these rooms embody excess. At Charlottenburg in Berlin Frederick I created a room for Sophie, Leibniz’s correspondent and the clever one in the marriage. Here it is so layered that porcelain is not only reflected in mirrors but recedes into the walls. There are jars in front of dishes resting on brackets on glass, niches running round the room for tiny pots, painted Chinese figures with dishes as hats. Images weave across different dimensions.

  Augustus has seen how other rulers use porcelain and is dismissive. He remembers his visit to the Trianon de Porcelaine at Versailles almost forty years ago. What is the point of having a pretty little pavilion sitting damply in your parkland to show your visitors, or a room somewhere up near the library or a music salon with some rows of vases on the chimney piece? It would look like you had used up all your porcelain!

  So the work has started on Augustus’ Japanisches Palais across the Elbe. It is vast. The roof of the palace sweeps down like a pagoda. You enter through a great gateway and see a courtyard beyond you. All the columns are held up by crouching oriental figures. The toes of their sandals sweep up. You go right up a run of shallow steps, and when you reach the first floor, you will be in a long room which contains nothing but the beautiful red and brown Jaspis porcelains from China and Japan. And then the double doors at the end will be thrown open and you will enter a room furnished entirely with celadon porcelain. And on. Through blues and greens and then purples. Through different colours and patterns of porcelain, each space opening on to the next. It is a fugue state, a journey through the spectrum of porcelain. You end up either in a chapel of white porcelain or a small and perfect space of white and gilded porcelains. It is music.

  The Japanisches Palais is to be the greatest building of porcelain since the emperor Yongle ordered the pagoda in memory of his parents three hundred years ago.

  Augustus orders a painting showing ‘Saxony and Japan who quarrel over the perfection of their porcelain manufactories … The goddess [Minerva] will graciously bestow the award of the struggle into Saxony’s hands. Jealousy and dismay will prompt Japan to load their porcelain wares back on to the ships that once brought them here.’

  I remember that early in his porcelain madness, Augustus dreamt of sending ships to the Orient – Japan or China – to buy up what he could. It is different now.

  ii

  On my final day in Dresden the temperature drops even further. As I’ve never been inside the Japanisches Palais, I make an appointment. The porcelain is long gone. Thirty years after Augustus died the great displays were stripped back, room after room of different glazes and patterns, and moved to the cellars. In the 1860s, ‘duplicate’ porcelain was sold or swapped. The French porcelain manufactory of Sèvres did really well out of this trading. An educational museum of ceramics was planned. It never happened.

  Design for the Japanisches Palais, Dresden, 1730

  I get stuck here, thinking of the breaking up of Augustus’ collections, wondering why ‘duplicate’ should have been a problem, as duplication, multiplication was the only imperative in his life.

  The palais has been home to the coin collections, to the antiquities collections, the state library and for a hundred years, an ethnographic museum and geological museum have been here too. It has been a Dresden lumber room. And it is now almost deserted. Most of these ethnographic collections have gone, off to a new museum in Chemnitz. Three white vans are parked aslant in the great courtyard. A few lights are on. A conservator comes to meet me. She has been working for eighteen years on a decorated, panelled wooden room from Damascus, bought a century before, dismantled and stored, forgotten as objects and collections came and went, shipped to the fortress at Königstein during the Second World War, retrieved. It is a room of perfect proportions, to sit in and talk, Arabic poetry on panels high up, painted cartouches of fruit amongst the flowers.

  The poetry, she says, was chosen so that it would offend no one who came, Muslim, Christian or Jew.

  And in her vast workshop overlooking Dresden, the rooms of the palais that used to be the rooms for celadon porcelain, with half-conserved panels on the floor, she brings out small cakes, makes green tea and serves it in glasses.

  I couldn’t get to Damascus, but I realise that Damascus has come to me. We talk about porcelain and she finds photographs of great dishes of Chinese blue-and-white from Jingdezhen displayed in rooms in Damascus and Aleppo, waiting to be taken down, placed on these carpets of flowers, heaped with pilafs, shared with family, guests, travellers.

  iii

  It has taken me over twenty years to get here to the p
alais.

  I had an ink sketch of one of these rooms pinned up above my wheel for a very long time. It was a challenge. Did I want to make porcelain that could be shuffled around, or could I make more of a demand on the world, shape a part of it with more coherence?

  I made my own porcelain room for an exhibition at the Geffrye Museum, a kindly brick-built eighteenth-century almshouse on a grim and busy road in the East End of London, now a museum for the history of the domestic interior. Another artist, a maker of baroque and highly coloured ceramics, and I were each given a space and a modest budget. I said yes on the turn of the conversation. I reckoned that the last porcelain room had been commissioned towards the end of the 1770s, a mirrored room of porcelain confectionery, spun in gilded nonsense for some Italian palace.

  I wanted to be able to feel what it was like to be surrounded by porcelain. It was a stage set in MDF, rather than marble, in a temporary exhibition space in the basement rather than overlooking a deer park, or the Elbe. But theatricality was part of every porcelain room ever built. And this felt fine.

  For it to be a proper room I needed a wall and a floor and a ceiling and light. The wall was 400 cylinders, each four inches high on fifteen shelves. Repetitions and returns as clear as any bit of Philip Glass piano music. On the floor were black industrial bricks. I put seventy shallow dishes into a thin channel, a line of grey porcelain inlaid into the ground like a sustained note.

  Light came in through a porcelain window. I’d thrown huge cylinders, trimmed them as thinly as I could and cut them into panels. I dried these very slowly between boards and fired them with trepidation over several days. Then I held them up to the light. They worked. They were translucent; light filtered through, just. It was a sort of dusty, slightly yellow creeping kind of light, but lucid. I saw my hand through my material, darkly.