‘For a crack or flaw despis’d’: Thinking about Ceramic Durability and the ‘Everyday’ in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England

When the Ceramics displays at England’s Victoria and Albert Museum reopened in September 2009 in their updated, century-old purpose-built galleries on the upper floors of the main Aston Webb building, they contained a ‘major gallery devoted to ceramic materials and techniques’ (as promised in the earlier plans for the re-display).1 But for all this, there has not been a great break (if you will excuse the pun) with tradition, in the museological focus on the complete ceramic; that is, on the ceramic which, to the average eye is without flaw or the repair of which is so expertly achieved as to be invisible to that average eye. The new galleries are shrines still to the rare survival, be it pre-Christian Chinese artefacts or Bernard Leach studio pieces, rather than to that archaeological commonplace, the potsherd.