Manufactory Rim-Specification, Catalogued as a Single Hand

Look first at the red lines—two faint radials ruled through the lowest wedge, the kind a hand draws not to be seen but to be obeyed, splitting the arc so the colorist need solve only one snowflake and trust the kiln to repeat the other five. None of these plates is drawn whole. Each is a half, a quarter, a working sliver: rim painted out to where symmetry takes over and the pottery finishes the rest. The page bears a number in its corner, because it is page twenty-four of something, a leaf in a firm's running ledger of saleable rims—pink ground with scrolled cartouche, a thin Sèvres-aspiring laurel chain in green and gold, the bolder yellow strapwork below. And the watercolor is fine; I will say that plainly, having watched lesser men ruin a cartouche. The colorist tests four palettes on one sheet with real economy, balances the rose against the celadon, knows exactly how much gilding a Staffordshire buyer will pay to imagine, and stops the brush the instant the pattern is legible—a thrift the porcelain towns of the Mediterranean rarely bothered to learn, drowning whole grounds where this hand spends nothing it need not. The intelligence here is commercial, and it is genuine. What the leaf cannot give you, for all the paperwork's insistence, is an author. It is a specification, not a picture; the labor already divided between the man who rules the wedge and the works that pours the glaze, its completeness deferred forever to a rim that will fire long after both. (He is thirty-odd when he draws this, and dies young, and never once thinks of it as art—it is Tuesday's order.) The hand is good, the paper is acid and already browning at the tipped edges, the gilding a line of intention not yet metal. And the catalogue, finding a half-plate and a page number, writes Artist, and Drawings, and lays the trade-counter ash out under glass as though one man had meant the whole of it. — QK