Vintage View: Spring cleaning your ceramics

Kya deLongchamps is vintage spring cleaning, starting with ceramics

WHILE some antiques are gnarled survivors of centuries — wearing their distress with pride, there are some more precious characters in your earthly hoard that demand an angel’s touch. From Jensen to Georgian and Sevres to mid-century Scandinavian, take a strategic, careful approach when sprucing up those vintage and antique surfaces.

Ceramics (porcelain, pottery — anything with a clay mineral body, toughened by heat and glazing) cover a huge range of objects. They all share one commonality — a sufficient whack, a clumsy ding — and they break, crack, flake or chip, and value takes an equal blow.

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, advises on handling valuable ceramics as little as possible, as contact blows are the star turn for damage. We’re not trying to remove ‘historic dirt’, very old staining driven into crazing or small dark pits in the surface.

There will be no cheerful scrubbing, putting the piece in the oven, dashing bleach onto darkened cracks. Trust me, don’t perform any online hero-hacks on your good vintage and antiques. Take off your rings to avoid a cruel knock, and wash and dry your hands before you start. Stick on a cotton pinny and turn away from that dishwasher — no, no, no.

Lay out two soft towels into two large plastic washing up bowls set side by side with enough warm (not hot), water to get the intended piece wet with a little ladling of water by hand. Put an old newspaper underneath to keep the bowls steady and to sop up any spills.

Put another towel down flat to the side of the bowls, to put down your finished but wet pieces. Work left to right if you are right-handed. Put a dash of washing-up-liquid in the first bowl, disperse it well with a hand waggle, and set the bowls well in from the edge of your kitchen counter (just in case we have a runaway).

Wet ceramics are slippy, so work on them low, and never, ever in a bald sink. Don’t lift the piece by its handles or by any form of decoration. Before starting, take a look at the piece and notice any areas where the body (clay) is revealed by damage to the slip, or where it has been restored (potentially with water-soluble glue). If the piece is valuable, stop there and take it to a conservator.

Avoid immersing metal elements, chipped enamel, fragile lustre finishes and applied gilding which can easy lift and rub off. Many museum-quality decorative ceramics are not washed at all, but only brushed off with the deft flick of a sable paint brush and cleaned with a dampened Q-tip if needs be. Unglazed pottery is porous — don’t soak it if possible.

Otherwise, for our stouter, less aristocratic pieces sealed into a glaze (say a 50s tea-set) — holding the piece on a softened surface or embracing it safely down in your lap, use a dry or barely damp, soft, lint-free cloth that won’t catch detail, to sensitively take off heavy loose grime.

Use the pressure you would use to wash your face — or less. Now, bring it to your washing area and holding the piece supportively as you would a baby, lower it gently into the first bowl of warm water (with your dash of washing up liquid). Using a soft cloth, work over the piece gently.

Don’t work down onto the item with any force, work slowly and gently, as aggressive rubbing can remove the high shine we love in many glazed ceramics. Once satisfied, lift the object with plenty of cradling, bottom support, and lower it into the second bowl of clear warm water for a rinse.

Don’t be tempted to lash it under the tap at this point. The greasy surface of soap on glaze together with the force of the water can easily knock the ceramic out of your hands.

Be extremely careful during the exchange to not lose your grip and only immerse one piece at a time to avoid a cymbal clash of disaster. Use your hand to lift water over the piece, and then transfer it to another soft surface to dry. Blot with a nice soft old piece of towel rather than rub.

Replacing the pieces for display, think about a protective position. The base of good antique or vintage ceramics can be easily damaged, feet chipped and the base rubbed up. A small square of baize or chamois leather under the item will not only shield the material it but will stop your collection creeping along (and potentially off) a shelf with footfall and other resonant movements.

Give the items some physical and visual room to breathe, so that you can easily see them and lift them out as needed. Never stack.

Glazed display cases might seem a bit mumsy (Edwardian two-door Deco sunburst and neatly proportioned faux Georgians start at €30 at auction), but remain the’re the very best place for staging small glass and ceramics.