Northwood Peacocks on the Fence Blue "Heartbreak" Bowl

This blue pie crust edge bowl while very beautiful is no rarity. What makes it special is the way it's managed to survive what would normally be catastrophic damage.

I first saw this bowl looking a little dusty in a junk shop in Cornwall. It appeared wonderful, but when I picked it up and turned it over I saw the repair. I remember saying to the shopkeeper; "What a terrible shame, but with that damage nobody will ever buy it off you". His reply was quite curt; "I don't care if I never sell it; it's the best I've ever seen and I love looking at it sitting on my shelf." 

I put it back. It wasn't cheap; about half the price of a perfect example. I was on holiday in the area for a couple of weeks, during which I just couldn't get it out of my mind. The fact that someone, at some stage in its life, had gone to such extraordinary lengths to repair it set me thinking. This bowl must have meant an awful lot to somebody. Had it been a treasured gift from a son killed in the War or a precious inherited memory of a dearly departed parent? Did someone's heart break like it did on the fateful day it was accidentally rent in two?

One thing was certain: it had almost certainly been repaired a long time ago, before the advent of high strength adhesives, which would have been a much easier and less risky process than drilling and inserting hand made metal staples; a remarkably skillful process traditionally used to repair fine china. If this had been done back in say the 1930's the value of the bowl would have been low compared with the cost and effort involved in its' repair which added even more credence to the fact that it's worth to its owner when it was damaged must have been huge. I can fully understand this; in the same circumstances I would want to save it if at all possible. 

Crunch time came at the end of my holiday. I went back to the junk shop; it was still sitting on its shelf. Now I understood how special it was I had to buy it. I couldn't even persuade the shopkeeper to give me a price discount: as he'd said, he wasn't bothered about selling it. When I got it home and cleaned it up, I was even more amazed at the quality and precision of the repair. Although the two halves of the bowl have been completely separated, the repair is virtually invisible on the front face and can barely be seen as a line no wider than a hair. There is no loss of iridescence. The break was incredibly clean with no shattering of the edges to the extent of even passing cleanly through the centre of one of the teeth at the bowl edge. How it came to be broken is impossible to say.

This is the one piece for which I'd love to have a time machine to go back and find out the true story of its history. Failing this I'm still very content to have this wonderful example on display; its a great conversation piece, and I can honestly say nobody ever guesses that it has been repaired. It proves that you don't have to be perfect to be special.

If this has stirred up your interest in beautiful things that are not necessarily perfect in a conventional sense but still worthy of being cherished, you may be interested in this blog site I found dedicated to such survivors: www.andrewbaseman.com which contains a listing under the title "Past Imperfect The Art of Inventive Repair".

The David Richards Collection

Cumbria, UK