‘A Certain Barbaric Originality’: Moroccan Pottery as Viewed by British Travel Writers of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The present paper is one part of a larger research project undertaken on a group of nineteenth-century Moroccan ceramics in the collection of the Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. The scholarly interest in such wares has to date been biased towards ethnographic studies and formal cataloguing of types. Such approaches have an important place in the study of visual cultures, and indeed a study of forms and decorative types represented within the RMS collection is currently being prepared by the present author. However, a purely formalistic approach reveals virtually nothing of how an object has been viewed by successive audiences, and thus ignores a huge part of its visual existence. In the study of nineteenth-century Moroccan wares there is a gift to the art historian in the sheer volume of travel literature that was written by Europeans and particularly Britons in the nineteenth century, allowing an unusually clear reconstruction of the way in which such pieces were understood by those who collected them and brought them to Britain. In the present study, the means by which the wares of nineteenth-century Morocco entered the British and European visual consciousness, and the implications of the responses they drew from British audiences as attested by the comments of nineteenth-century travel writers, are examined in detail to create a new art-historical discourse of material culture in the colonial Maghreb.