Anecdote of the Teapot

In 2016 a small blue-and-white teapot with a repaired handle and a missing lid sold online for around twenty dollars, a plausible price for damaged bric-a-brac, at an antiques sale in Lincolnshire. “If it hadn’t been for that Internet bid,” an expert in English ceramics remarked of the lone offer, “it probably would have ended up in a bin”—in a trash can, that is. Two years later the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought the teapot at an auction in Salisbury for $806,000. What changed? Connoisseurs had recognized that the teapot’s graceful palms and cranes, depicted in cobalt blue glaze, matched a handful of tea bowls and saucers that had surfaced in various places in England. It is now believed these exquisite works were made in South Carolina during the 1760s by an enigmatic English émigré potter named John Bartlam.¹

Only ten of Bartlam’s pots have survived intact, all in England, and all closely resembling fragments unearthed at the site of his first pottery enterprise near Charleston.² How his pots came to England remains a mystery. Were they samples to prove his mastery to possible English importers? Were they brought by Loyalists during the Revolution? Are British collectors more assiduous than their American counterparts? An analysis some twenty years ago determined that excavated shards of Bartlam’s vessels, with their eggshell-thin walls translucent under strong light, were composed of porcelain, that glass-like substance first made in China a millennium ago, its recipe jealously guarded for centuries. Bartlam’s teapot and its companions are now regarded as the first North American examples of soft-paste porcelain (fired at a lower temperature than vitrified hard-paste), a designation that, in addition to the beauty of the teapot itself, accounts for the eye-popping price the Met paid for it.

Ever since Portuguese galleons first conveyed fine “china” to an insatiable European market in the sixteenth century, porcelain, known as “white gold” to alchemists eager to crack the secret of its production, has been tied to financial value. Augustus the Strong, a porcelain fanatic who ruled Saxony and Poland, once traded six hundred dragoons to Frederick the Great of Prussia for a collection featuring eighteen rare Chinese vases. In 1701 Augustus imprisoned an alchemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, who had rashly bragged that he could turn lead into gold. Seven years later, as Edmund de Waal notes in his vivid account in The White Road (2015), Böttger collaborated with the eminent German scientist Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus, friend of Leibniz, and succeeded in making hard-paste porcelain instead.³ Dresden, the Saxon capital, became the center of European porcelain production after its Meissen factory began production two years later.

Bartlam’s teapot can be seen as an allegory for porcelain’s journey from the East, where Marco Polo first reported its existence.⁴ With its two contrasting vignettes, the teapot is like a miniature globe. Turn the spout to the right and we are in a Chinese pleasure garden, with a man on a bridge, a scholarly hermit perhaps, beckoning to a passing boat. Turn it to the left and we are in South Carolina, with a sabal palmetto fluttering in the breeze—South Carolina is the Palmetto State—and a pair of sandhill cranes, also native to the region, seeking shade in its shadow.⁵ Beaks aligned, they compose a happy household, unlike the man on the bridge, whose world of pines and pagodas is vanishing into indistinguishable air and water. In such seductive scenes, to borrow de Waal’s formulation, “it seems natural that the world should be refracted into blue and white.”

In England a teapot like this was part of a long-established domestic ritual. “Under certain circumstances,” Henry James wrote in the opening sentence of The Portrait of a Lady, “there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” In the coastal colonies, by contrast, the forest began a few miles, or a few hundred feet, from the teapot’s civilizing sway. One purpose of such pots was to tame their surroundings, at least symbolically, as in Wallace Stevens’s poem about a jar placed on a hill in Tennessee: “The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild.”

A further layer of exotic associations derived from kaolin, the essential ingredient for porcelain, extracted from the contested Cherokee lands in the Carolina outback. Locally known as unaker, a romanization of the Cherokee word for white, the clay had special spiritual significance for the Indigenous peoples. In England it was referred to as “Cherokee clay” and coveted by potters seeking to imitate porcelain. No comparable clay had been found in England. Determined to corner the market, the potter-entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, founder of a ceramics empire in Staffordshire, hired an agent to make the trek to western Carolina on foot and horseback, broker an agreement with the Cherokee, and bring back five tons of white clay to England, where Wedgwood used the exceptionally fine-grained substance to make his fashionable neoclassical jasperware.

William Bartram, the Quaker explorer and plant collector from Philadelphia, whose alluring descriptions of natural scenery in the American South inspired Coleridge and Wordsworth and who knew of the British interest in the clay, followed the same route in 1775, describing “oozy springs and rills” containing “veins or strata of most pure and clear white earth, having a faint bluish or pearl color gleam, somewhat exhibiting the appearance of the little cliffs or wavy crests of new fallen snowdrifts.” It was this dazzling white clay, as alluring as Gatsby’s green light, that first drew John Bartlam to South Carolina.

We can identify the influences that went into the making of Bartlam’s teapot, especially the European mode of chinoiserie, with its naturalistic gardens so unlike the geometrical French versions, punctuated—as in the Chinese scene on Bartlam’s teapot—with pagodas, arched bridges, and rustic teahouses. Aristocratic aesthetes like Horace Walpole were smitten with the frolics of stereotypically Chinese figures borrowed from Asian sources and from rococo artists like Watteau and Boucher. Even Bartlam’s South Carolina scene partakes of chinoiserie; his cranes have their Chinese analogues—symbols of longevity—and a tiny sampan is visible in the distance. A fascinating exhibition currently on view at the Met explores, from a feminist point of view, the “Monstrous Beauty” ingrained in chinoiserie—that “effeminate, ornate style fed by a demand for foreign luxuries and fantasies of an imaginary Far East,” to quote the introductory wall text—in which shipwrecks and sirens proliferate and a broken teapot can signify a marriage on the rocks.

Amid these stylistic crosscurrents, Bartlam himself remains elusive. No letters in his hand survive. We know him from four sources: his debts; his boastful advertisements; Wedgwood’s obsession with him; and, of course, the pots and potsherds he left behind. As a master potter in Wedgwood’s firm, Bartlam learned to throw thin-walled vessels on the wheel, transfer decorations from prints, mix glazes, and fire pots in the kiln. He was an entrepreneur but also something of a gambler. Throughout his life we see him dreaming up elaborate schemes, borrowing large sums to achieve them, and, when things don’t break his way, moving on.

The American colonies were Wedgwood’s primary overseas market. He imported South Carolina clay, used it to make wares in Staffordshire, then exported his products back to the colonies. Bartlam saw an opening. Married with children and cavalier about his finances, he had run up debts in Staffordshire that he couldn’t repay. His big idea was to cut out the middleman from Wedgwood’s global enterprise, interrupting the imperial model of imported raw materials servicing British manufacturers. With an abundant supply of cheap local clays, Bartlam could sell his wares directly to American markets. Outraged by such disloyalty, Wedgwood was delighted with reports, later proved false, that a party of Bartlam’s family had vanished in a shipwreck. In 1767 he wrote with alarm, “I am informed they have the Cherok[ee] clay to a Pottwork at Charles Town.” He was referring to Bartlam.

Bartlam’s American adventure was bracketed by wars. The French and Indian War ended in 1763, the year he arrived in South Carolina. British victory extended the colonial enterprise westward to the Appalachians and southward to Florida, releasing a flood of migration from England and Scotland. Bartlam established his pottery nine miles north of Charles Town (later Charleston) in a settlement called Cain Hoy, at a bend in the Wando River. Already a hub for brick factories, the location provided ready access to good clays and transportation. At Cain Hoy, Bartlam advertised for African American workers, presumably enslaved artisans rented from nearby plantations. He made pottery in various styles, utilitarian and refined, as evidenced by fragments discovered at the site. He acquired, presumably from Indigenous suppliers, the requisite snow-white clay to make porcelain. He succeeded where others had failed, making elegant porcelain objects, including the Met’s blue-and-white teapot, for a sophisticated urban clientele.

In 1770 Bartlam moved his operation to Charles Town—a thriving colonial port city—presumably to be closer to his clients, and set up shop with generous loans from two of the city’s most powerful men, Henry Laurens and Peter Manigault. Slavery fueled the region’s economy; Laurens and Manigault owned huge plantations and were among the biggest slave traders in the world. In an irony not lost on British observers, both men supported the cause of American freedom, with Laurens serving as president of the Second Continental Congress.

Bartlam’s timing was excellent. Laurens and Manigault, like their counterparts in Philadelphia and Boston, were incensed by the taxes imposed by the British to recoup their losses in the French and Indian War. So-called nonimportation agreements were established in major American ports, boycotts that culminated in the Boston Tea Party, an indication of the significance of the Asian import to the colonial economy. Bartlam’s Charles Town factory and its competitor, the Bonnin and Morris American China Factory in Philadelphia, benefited from nationalist fervor for products made in America. When the British government lifted the levies, it was good news for colonial consumers and traders. But for domestic manufacturers, who had to lure skilled workers from Europe and compete against cheaper (and sometimes better-made) imports from the East India Company, it was disastrous. The Bonnin and Morris operation failed after barely two years. And Bartlam moved once more, to distance himself yet again from his creditors.

We next hear from Bartlam in the frontier trading post of Camden, South Carolina, in 1774. Camden’s founder, Joseph Kershaw, was a former Charles Town merchant who, beginning in 1758, ran various businesses at his own settlement, including a general store, works for processing indigo and tobacco, and a distillery. Bartlam established a pottery in the vicinity of Kershaw’s settlement, rich in clays including kaolin, and advertised his wares as “equal in Quality and Appearance, and…as cheap, as any imported from England.” Like Bartlam’s previous backers, Kershaw was a staunch supporter of the Continental cause. Camden, well placed on the road connecting Charles Town to North Carolina and Virginia, became a depot for Continental arms and gunpowder.

South Carolina was a dangerous place for a man of uncertain loyalties. Such was Bartlam’s luck that he managed to be on the losing side twice. As expected for an able-bodied man in Kershaw’s trading center, Bartlam enlisted in the local branch of the South Carolina militia. In the early phases of the war, with the Continentals victorious at Saratoga and a resulting stalemate in the North, it must have seemed a reasonable decision. But when the conflict shifted to the South in 1778, with the British decision to shore up their interests in South Carolina and the West Indies, Camden was suddenly a prize for both sides.

Horatio Gates, the victor of Saratoga, took his army south to engage the British commander Charles Cornwallis outside Camden, with disastrous results. Continental forces collapsed under the British assault, with Gates himself fleeing the scene on a fast horse. British troops occupied Camden, taking Kershaw’s house as their headquarters. At some point amid the turmoil, Bartlam’s Loyalist convictions became clear, and may have proved fatal. Cornwallis, flush with victory, took his increasingly exposed army north to engage the wily American commander Nathanael Greene, Gates’s replacement as commander of the Continental Army in the South. The Battle of Guilford Court House, in present-day Greensboro, exacted a terrible toll on Cornwallis’s troops. Greene made the bold decision to retake Camden, further isolating Cornwallis. Instead of retreating to defend South Carolina, Cornwallis moved into a trap on the Virginia coast and was forced to surrender, in the fall of 1781, to Washington at Yorktown. The Revolution was over.

What happened to Bartlam amid the chaos in Camden? We know that he died in 1781. We know that his wife, the widow of a disgraced Loyalist, then followed British troops in their retreat south and eventually returned to Britain. We know these things because she submitted an official request to the British government asking for financial restitution, based on her husband’s Loyalist sympathies. What we don’t know is how Bartlam died. Was he killed defending Camden from General Greene’s onslaught? Was he a victim of anti-Loyalist reprisals? And what happened to his pottery operation in Camden, the precise location of which remains a mystery? Will smashed fragments left in the wake of the British retreat come to light someday, wedged into the clay of a golf course or a cemetery?

Porcelain’s fragility makes it a poignant symbol in accounts of wartime destruction. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel about the Allied firebombing of Dresden, hinges on the theft of a teapot salvaged from the porcelain city’s rubble.⁶ In the 2024 documentary film Porcelain War, nominated for an Academy Award, a couple in Kharkiv create porcelain figures amid the Russian advance. “Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break, but impossible to destroy,” says the husband, who trains local militias when he’s not fashioning molds for porcelain. His wife decorates porcelain figurines and attack drones with fanciful images drawn from the struggle for survival in wartime. While gathering mushrooms in the forest, the couple flag Russian mines concealed by underbrush. Pastoral views of sunflower fields are juxtaposed with close-up footage of a Kharkiv platoon going up against Russian infantrymen.

“If the opposite of war is peace,” Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), “the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.” Czesław Miłosz’s “Song on Porcelain,” in Robert Pinsky’s translation, contrasts the pastoral decorations on fine porcelain, like those on Bartlam’s teapot, with their fate in wartime:

Rose-colored cup and saucer,
Flowery demitasses:
They lie beside the river
Where an armored column passes.

“Of all things broken and lost,” Miłosz writes, “Porcelain troubles me most.”

Does Bartlam’s Janus-faced teapot, with its twinned pastoral scenes, imply some occult connection between China and South Carolina? Coleridge seems to have felt something of the kind when he filled out the exotic landscape of his opium-induced poem “Kubla Khan” with details culled from William Bartram’s travels through Florida and the Carolinas. Horace Walpole, promoter of chinoiserie, prodigious collector of porcelain, and godfather to Horatio Gates, the disgraced commander at Camden, evidently thought so, too.

In Walpole’s fantastical tale “Mi Li,” tea tethers the distant locales of China and South Carolina. A Chinese prince is informed by his fairy godmother, as she reads his fortune in a teacup, that he will marry “a princess whose name was the same with her father’s dominions.” After a mysterious dream, the prince travels to the English countryside, where he finds himself in a Chinese garden much like the one depicted on Bartlam’s teapot, with “a cottage that stood on a precipice near the bridge, and hung over the river.” There he meets Caroline Campbell, daughter of Lord William Campbell, royal governor of South Carolina. Recognizing his destiny, the lovesick prince “scalded his mouth with the tea he was drinking, broke the old china cup it was in, and which the queen his mother had given him at his departure from Pekin.” In a reversal of the usual Orientalist narrative, Lady Caroline, “collected” by Mi Li, becomes princess of China.

Amid such fantasy, Walpole has planted some hard facts. Lord William Campbell was the last British governor of South Carolina and a family friend of Walpole. He had served in North America during the French and Indian War, where he met and married Sarah Izard, from a prominent South Carolina family. Eager to settle there, he was named governor of South Carolina in June 1775, right at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Forced to leave his home in Charles Town, he sought refuge on a British warship in the harbor before making his way back to England.

Was it mere coincidence that Bartlam’s teapot and Walpole’s tale told such similar stories, concocted of tea and gardens, political unrest and fantasies of the good life, and set in China, England, and South Carolina? Or was it serendipity, that beautiful word coined by Horace Walpole himself to describe those curiously interwoven events, neither planned nor foreseen and resisting explanation, that so enrich and bedevil our lives?