Gerry Wedd: My blue and white china

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

Oscar Wilde, 1874

As an aesthete Wilde surrounded himself with beautiful objects. This epigram from his Oxford days paid tribute to and satirised the Victorian craze for the exotic. At Oxford University Wilde was introduced to the culture of aesthetes by art critic and philanthropist John Ruskin whose writings on craft also influenced William Morris.

 

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