Doing Delft differently: how Simon Pettet reshaped Dutch pottery for the present

Visit London’s Liverpool Street Station and you will find noise, pollution and crowds of commuters dashing to and fro, while office blocks of glass and steel loom large overhead. Yet cross the road to Folgate Street, and, at No. 18, you will enter a different world entirely.

This 18th-century house was – until his death in 1999 – home to one Dennis Severs. The son of petrol station-owners from California, Severs was, perhaps, born in the wrong time and place. As soon as he graduated high school in 1967, Severs left the US for London, craving an older world enriched by the patina of history. Here he ran tours by horse and carriage; in 1979, he purchased a derelict house in the then-shabby district of Spitalfields.

Above: Delft shoes by Simon Pettet at Dennis Severs' House. Photo: © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies

Severs proceeded to transform No. 18 Folgate Street into an elaborate setpiece. In every room of the Georgian house, he aimed to capture the spirit of an age. He did this through room-scale still lives that dramatised the story of a fictional family, the Jervises: Huguenot silk weavers, who he imagined had lived in the house from 1725 to 1919.

To this day, each room evokes the sights, sounds and smells of its respective era, both nice and nasty (tired cabbage leaves wilt on the kitchen table; a chamber pot is refilled each day with fresh urine). The house was open for tours led by Severs for almost 20 years; today, visitors are still invited to enter into its imaginative realm. As he put it: ‘I will get the 21st century out of your eyes and ears. With every age we visit, we will be governed by its spirit.’

Decorating the place to achieve this goal was no small task. There to help was his partner, Simon Pettet: a ceramicist he had met aged 18 outside the nightclub Heaven, in in 1983; he moved into the house soon after.

While Severs took an imaginatively slapdash approach when creating evocative touches – plastic fruit from Tesco served for decorative faux-plaster mouldings, for example – Pettet was his opposite, meticulously researching historic designs in museums such as the V&A and the Rijksmuseum.

Pettet had studied ceramics at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in the mid-1980s, and once Severs introduced him to Deltware, he was hooked – fascinated by the blue on white tin-glazed earthenware from 17th- and 18th-century Holland.

His strength lay in replicating this 400-year old tradition with skill and finesse, while simultaneously reimagining its motifs for the present day. The artisans of old painted almost anything on their wares – from allegories and myths, to brawls and bawdy scenes. Pettet followed suit, yet with one important contemporary addition: portraiture.

One tile features artist duo Gilbert & George, fellow residents of bohemian Spitalfields, pictured in their characteristic deadpan style; another is a self portrait, in which we see the young ceramicist toiling over his tiles. These local characters appear in a fireplace surround he created in 1985 for the master bedroom, which became a satirical gallery of sorts. This is a subtle form of satire: at a glance, the tiles – collectively titled The Gentrification Piece – appear historical, their playful contemporary nature revealed only on closer inspection.

To create these Delft-style ceramic tiles was no small feat. Pettet first rolled out clay with a rolling pin, cut it into shape, slow-dried it to avoid cracking, low-fired each tile, then painted them freehand. The absorbency of the clay means that any mistaken mark made with cobalt blue oxide cannot be erased before the final glaze firing. As he once put it, ‘The glazing on a tile is like fitting a glass hat on a flower. It’s extremely difficult to get right.’

A new exhibition hosted in the house – and an in-depth book accompanying the show – gathers together a wide variety of his ceramics, ranging from mugs to tulipières (pyramidal vases designed to show off prized tulips), which are dotted around the house. Most original, perhaps, are the two-dimensional profile pots: flattened versions of historical pieces, which here snake up the black-painted stairs.

Featuring previously unseen artworks from private collections, this is Pettet’s largest showing yet: his pieces reunited in the place he lived and worked all too briefly. In 1993, following a two-year illness that had sapped him of the strength to design and make, Pettet died of AIDS at the age of just 28. Today, his pieces stand proud in Dennis Severs’ House: a vivid reminder of all he achieved during a life cut short.

Visit Making History: The Ceramic Work of Simon Pettet at Dennis Severs’ House in London from 4 May until 4 June 2023; the accompanying book is available to purchase at the house.