Making History At Dennis Severs’ House

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Rupert Thomas former editor of The World of Interiors and now curator of MAKING HISTORY: THE CERAMIC WORK OF SIMON PETTET introduces the exhibition which runs until 4th June at Dennis Severs’ House

Tulipière by Simon Pettet

18 Folgate Street is an amazing survival – and a unique fantasy. It was built in 1724 but the powerful atmosphere of its interior was created by Dennis Severs, a charismatic Californian who rescued it from almost certain destruction in 1979.

Dennis restored the house with characteristic theatricality, employing unlikely materials to finish the job as quickly as possible. So not everything here is what it seems. He also devised a family of Huguenot weavers – the Jervises – who had built the property and who continued to “live” alongside him in rooms lit by candles and heated by real fires.

Paying guests would hear, though never see, this family on the guided house tours he offered. Atmosphere mattered far more to Dennis than slavish accuracy and his tours were choreographed to leave visitors feeling palpably as if they had stepped back 250 years. Every possible effect was employed in the immersive drama, including accurate contents in the chamber pots. “You either see it or you don’t,” he told visitors before they were admitted.

When Simon Pettet walked through the door one night in 1983 he saw “it” immediately and was smitten. They had met at the gay nightclub Heaven: Simon was eighteen and starting a ceramics degree at Camberwell School of Art & Design, Dennis was in his thirties and tirelessly working on the home they would share for almost a decade. The encounter changed their lives forever. If the house is Dennis’ vision, the role Simon played in making that vision a reality cannot be underestimated.

Simon was born in 1965 and grew up in Orpington with his parents Ken and Marion, and his older brother Stewart. If school was a chore, he excelled at Camberwell and graduated with a First. But it was Dennis, the house and life in Spitalfields that allowed his work to take flight. Inspired by 18th-century blue-and-white tin-glaze pottery, or delftware, he began to make objects that would have been used in grand dwellings such as 18 Folgate Street when they were new. He was instinctively able to capture the spirit of authentic Delft pottery and with a flick of his brush conjure works that are rooted in the past but feel entirely of their own time. To give credence to Dennis’ fictional family, he inscribed some pieces with the name Jervis.

Remarkably, all the works in the exhibition were produced in less than ten years. Simon was diagnosed HIV positive in 1984, at a point when the condition’s outcome was inevitable. He was nineteen. His was one of the earliest cases in the UK (the first was identified in December 1981). Yet despite the prejudice and injustice then surrounding Aids, Simon remained optimistically steadfast and never stopped working or trying out new forms and glazes. It is as if his status acted as an incentive. To the end, he wanted to be known as a Potter as opposed to an Artist, a choice that reflects his modesty but in no way diminishes the brilliant originality of what he achieved. He died on 26th December 1993, less than a month before his twenty-ninth birthday. His service took place at Christ Church Spitalfields, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s imposing masterpiece.

Generously, the Jervis family has gone on holiday for the duration of the exhibition so their rooms can be given over to the things Simon made. This is his first retrospective and it includes objects kindly loaned by private individuals alongside pieces he made specifically for Dennis that remain in the house. But the Jervises are still here in spirit, as is Dennis – you might even hear his voice, as the intermittent audio of horses’ hooves and a tolling bell was made by him and used on his own tours. We have interwoven it with some of Simon’s favourite songs from the period. And of course Simon is here too: you’ll see the room in which he lived, the kitchen where he and Dennis made toast on the range, and his exceptional work. The ceramics he created remain as witty, elegant and joyously individual as the day they emerged from the kiln.

Shaving bowl in the Smoking Room

Mr Jervis’s barber’s bowl, made by Simon in 1990. In the eighteenth century, customers would hold these bowls, with indent to their neck, as the barber mixed water and soap into a lather. Soap balls were not produced in England until after 1685, when Huguenot refugee soap-boilers arrived from Paris. Bowls were often decorated with representations of relevant equipment – in this case scissors, comb, sponge etc – but lancets could also appear, as barbers also operated as surgeons.