ABSTRACT
The history of Augustus Wollaston Franks’s and Charles Drury Fortnum’s early commentaries on Islamic ceramic shows how groping and uncertain were the first analyses of Islamic art, how erroneous were the labels stuck onto the objects and how erratic were the categories formed. The most crucial impulse given to the study of Islamic art in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain was that of the 1885 exhibition organised by the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Beyond aesthetic pleasure at the lavish display of objects, the exhibition provided an excellent opportunity for comparing, analysing and classifying objects, which marked a definite step forward in the knowledge of Islamic art. Besides this purely formal quality of pattern-designing, however, William Morris also perceived the quality of craftsmanship of Islamic art, a quality which was his own battle cry.
