Call It Madness, Call It Mania, Call It Magic, but Majolica Comes to Baltimore

The ultimate look at a Victorian craze for colorful ceramics

T he new exhibition at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore — Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 — is delightful, even glorious, informative, and rigorous.

The museum world is filled these days with so many pious drudges, so many clapping seals. And art about why it’s hot in the summer, how victimhood is a many-splendored thing, and what we can do to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and mediocrity.

It’s heartening to see a project dedicated to majolica, the boldly colored and modeled, glossy, lead-glazed earthenware that defines the Victorian era more than the dour old widow queen in black. It’s a salute to the art of the masses and of millionaires. There were lines of tableware for the home but also fancy and luxury pieces, fountains, and entire architectural programs. Tens of millions of pieces of majolica were, however, entirely affordable. Majolica is the art of empire, not the British Empire, though Minton in England pioneered it, but of the empire of ubiquity. For a time, until tastes turned more austere and lead poisoning started to kill the workforce that made it, majolica was everywhere.

With 350 objects, in enough hues to make a rainbow feel drab, Majolica Mania also celebrates the art of unsquashable ebullience. It’s a case of less is not always more, and sometimes more, more, more is what the subject demands and deserves.

The exhibition, done with the Bard Graduate Center in New York, fills the Hackerman House, or 1 West Mount Vernon Place, the recently restored 1850 mansion next to the Walters and now part of the museum’s galleries. It’s a distinguished house, very beautiful and elegant. Style-wise, it occupies that rare intersection between neoclassicism and wedding-cake rococo. I call it Palladian. With lots of fancy, even go-go, plaster moldings and Baccarat chandeliers, it’s a perfect backdrop for majolica. It’s neoclassicism at its wildest but just deferential enough to let the majolica rule supreme.

The exhibition dives right in, delivering a Victorian conservatory. That’s a room with a glass ceiling and glass doors, or a garden room. Transported to the Victorian era, we’d likely find a critical mass of majolica in this space and the dining room. In these spaces, nature came indoors, as food and as hothouse plants and a bubbling fountain. A majolica peacock, made by Minton in 1876, rules the roost, though I liked the “Rubens” garden seats, too, made by Josiah Wedgwood & Sons in 1873.

The peacock is lifelike, and that’s one of the beauties of Victorian majolica. Lead glazes and crisp molds captured the colors and forms of animals and flora, and when it came to color, the medium forecasts Technicolor. Majolica was cold- and sun-resistant, too, keeping its colors. Humidity doesn’t faze it in the least.

“Rubens” seems an odd choice for a garden seat with no fat nudes. What’s in the name? “Majolica” is derived from the Renaissance ceramics called “maiolica,” having vivid, tin-based glazes and, sometimes, a stab at three-dimensions or at least dramatic relief. The Della Robbia family’s ceramics are the most direct source. Victorians might have liked showy majolica a tad less had it not a Renaissance lineage. Rubens was a Baroque artist, but slap his name on an 1870s garden seat and you’ve got instant lineage.

The animal forms make for a zoo, or a jungle, or a dream about the “road to” movies starring Dorothy Lamour, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby (Road to Singapore, Road to Zanzibar, Road to Rio . . . ). There are majolica monkeys, cockatoos, banana leaves, corn, sheaves of wheat, cobras, and owls. An 1880 garden seat has Egyptian motifs, including a very black Egyptian. Bourgeois Victorians were crazy about orchids, ferns, and roses. Majolica vases complemented their indoor cultivation and display. Over time, majolica found a place in every corner of the Aesthetic Movement and every revival.

There’s a great section on the early English makers of majolica. The Hackerman House is now part of the museum, having had an exacting, tasteful renovation a couple of years ago. It’s the very best example of historic preservation. It creates way-finding challenges and makes a linear narrative reaching all visitors difficult, and likely impossible. There are multiple entrances to the show — by elevator, the splendid spiral staircase, and from the main museum. There’s a black peacock graphic throughout the main Walters galleries, and we’re told to “follow the peacock.” It’s easy to get lost. It also is what it is. The old house just has multiple rooms.

It’s partially my fault since I focused less on following the peacock and more on chatting with random other visitors. I can’t help it. I was a museum director once, and we’re always on the make, looking for who’s rich. Then I always coo-coo babies and ask after old people if I see they’re lugging an oxygen tank. I’m curious and solicitous, so I wandered quite a bit. Putting my eccentricities aside, though, way-finding is a problem in the show.

The history of majolica design belongs in the first gallery as an introduction, but I don’t feel strongly about it. The immersive conservatory was fine for me since I like jumping right in, but I know a lot about ceramics already. Others might be more timid, know nothing, or like a step-by-step approach.

There’s a good section on how glazes were made. Lead content enhanced color possibilities, reaching high and low tones. In majolica, little is pastel. A good case uses objects to show steps in the glazing process.

Minton & Co. developed majolica as a product line in the late 1840s, using chemistry to create mass-manufactured, grab-the-eye ceramics that evoked not only Italian maiolica but richly glazed, labor-intensive French Palissy ware, both made for the wealthy. Minton was one of hundreds of makers of ceramics, fine and mundane in Staffordshire, but one of the most experimental.

Henry Cole, the director of the South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria & Albert, promoted Minton’s majolica as an icon of well-designed, fetching ceramics for the masses. A series of world’s fairs featured Minton booths showing majolica. At the 1855 Paris International Exhibition, a mammoth majolica flower stand made by Minton sparked a French craze for the medium. Minton had already won the top prize for innovation at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, which helped introduce majolica to the English.

Majolica Mania moves into the dining room with Victoria, an extravagant Minton wine cooler from the late 1850s with a three-dimensional scene of hunters, dogs, foxes, and deer. Fox hunting and wine drinking don’t seem closely linked to me. I’d need a bucket of gin, not a glass of cooled wine, to erase the horror of, as Oscar Wilde said, the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible, but fox hunting has an athleticism, so a sip of wine afterwards might make sense to a certain ilk.

Tea sets, a zillion forms of dishes, punch bowls, and even a mousetrap are, together, enchanting and astounding. There’s a case of oyster dishes showing the variety of designs. Victorian high dining provided a separate form for every type of food, and through advances in transport and refrigeration, every type of food was the order of the day.

Majolica was associated with good hygiene. For all its elaborate surfaces, it was easy to clean since it was water-resistant, and the glazes were durable. It always looked fresh. Decorated with fruits, plants, vegetables, and animals from around the world, all looking at the peak of vitality, majolica seemed to promise vigor. The Royal Dairy at Windsor Castle, like all things royal an endlessly photographed locus of advanced thinking, was majolica-heavy. Prince Albert led the charge in promoting its cleanliness. This massive majolica program is still in situ, but the exhibition gives us a sense of it through photography. In 1860, at one of its Stoke-on-Trent factories, Minton constructed a majolica drinking fountain with a state-of-the-art charcoal filter, advancing the medium’s good sanitation.

The exhibition isn’t focused on Minton, though Minton’s chemists and designers invented and mastered majolica. Through the 1860s, Minton ruled the market. Soon, though, makers such as George Jones, Brownfield, Holdcroft, and Brown Westhead Moore were big producers and innovators. Majolica Mania looks at the niche of each. It’s good art history, but art history often has to concern itself with economics, marketing, and manufacturing. This is one of the things that makes art history fun and broadly useful. It’s not only aesthetics.

Majolica came to Gilded Age America before too long, and it was a very good fit indeed. The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 showed lots of majolica, foreign and domestic. A long depression in Britain spurred immigration to America, some from Staffordshire, and workers from the potteries raised the aesthetic bar in America’s ceramics industry, which was well developed but, design-wise, tentative. Factories were humming in Baltimore, Trenton, Phoenixville in Pennsylvania, and Peekskill in New York.

Baltimore’s makers get the most attention, as they should since the Walters is a Baltimore museum. The Chesapeake Pottery hired English designers and potters. David Haynes, the factory’s owner, led national ceramics trade organizations and made quality and design innovation his causes. He also focused on Baltimore design schools in enhancing standards. Baltimore has always been a high-design town, notably in silver, and, through Haynes’s work and Edwin Bennett Pottery, in majolica. I’m not surprised that new majolica products — molasses pots, souvenir jugs, and spittoons — catered to American practices not widely known in ye olde England.

The exhibition profiles half a dozen American makers. We never manage to shed our design conservatism when it comes to majolica, a surprise to me since Gilded Age taste tends toward the over-the-top. The American market aimed less at the high end and more at middle-class buyers who, then and now, are cautious, even tepid, in their taste, when their taste isn’t in search of cute.

Whither majolica? Safety aside, the Arts & Crafts movement didn’t accommodate its palette, forms, and mass production. Art pottery embraced the handmade and clean lines. Some American brands, such as Roseville and Catalina, have their early roots in majolica and kept aspects of it, including glossy finishes and, with Roseville, floral-relief decoration. Mostly, though, taste for majolica fizzled in the 1910s. There was no place for it in the Colonial Revival and Georgian Revival movements of the ’20s. Majolica’s anathema to post-war, Modernist taste.

A Requiem in White, from 2020 and commissioned for the show, is the impressive, moving glazed porcelain memorial to factory workers in America and England poisoned by lead exposure inherent in the manufacture of majolica. Ceramicist Walter McConnell made it in the form of a stupa, a traditional Buddhist structure containing religious relics for meditation. It’s composed of dozens of ceramic figures and vessels in a ghostly white, white because color in majolica killed. Starting in the 1890s, Parliament imposed workplace-safety rules in the UK, making majolica production more difficult. States in America did so, too. McConnell used photographs of workers in American and English potteries, dressed human models to look like them, and made casts using body scanners. Like majolica in its time, art today is driven in part by technology. There’s nothing wrong with this.

Majolica Mania is stimulated by an old-fashioned and most gratifying three-volume set that’s the definitive scholarly treatment of the subject. It’s a long-term collaboration between Bard and the Walters, both of which have big collections of majolica. It took many years to do and examines in depth majolica forms, the makers here and in the U.K., technology, and connoisseurship. Museums rarely tackle books of this scope, depth, and quality. Cost-wise, they’re in the range of a new battleship now. They’re for art libraries and connoisseurs, so the market is tiny. Nobody’s getting rich. Don’t expect to see the book muscling Bill O’Reilly or Nora Roberts from a best-sellers list.

A project like this requires curatorial longevity, aside from big bucks. It also needs an institutional passion for connoisseurship and scholarship. Passion and commitment have to be in the museum’s DNA and stewarded by the trustees, director, and staff. It takes a zeitgeist that’s the golden thread running through the museum’s essence. The Walters has always had this. This kind of work is out of style. Curators come and go. What high cost hasn’t killed, the diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, accessibility, and mediocrity movement will. Everything that can’t be marketed to a mass audience tends to land on Death Row. Kudos to the Walters and Bard for pulling this off.