The Blue That Travelled

The first time I held a sixteenth-century İznik tile, at a dealer’s flat in Kensington, I was surprised by its weight. Not physical weight, though it was heavier than I expected, but the weight of colour. The blue seemed to sit above the glaze, as if it had been laid there a moment ago and might still be wet.

That blue is cobalt, and cobalt is a traveller. It was mined in Persia, carried along caravan routes, traded in Tabriz and Bursa, and ground by hand in workshops by Lake İznik. Chinese potters had used it for centuries before; Ottoman potters looked at Ming porcelain, borrowed its blue and white, and then did something entirely their own with it.

The red that should not exist

What makes İznik extraordinary is not the blue. It is the red. Around 1550, the potters developed a slip made from Armenian bole, an iron-rich clay, that fired to a raised, tomato-coloured red. Nobody else in the world could make it. Within a century the recipe was lost, and the red disappeared with it.

I have tried, in my studio in Bristol, more than two hundred times. My reds come out brown, or orange, or they bubble and crack. Each failure is a small lesson in humility.

Blue to Delft, and back

Dutch potters in Delft were copying Chinese porcelain at the same time, using the same cobalt from the same distant mines. So the blue that travelled east to İznik also travelled west to Holland. Two traditions, never in direct contact, painting tulips and carnations in the same colour.

I keep one tile from each on my workbench. In the morning light they look like cousins who have never met but recognise each other at once.