Haven't actually seen it yet, Jess did the deal, moving in Sunday. Come visit!
Best thing is that it's near the Holburne Museum, which I used to hate as a kid but like now. It's just some colonial dude's collection but there's some fun stuff. Al was writing in his award-winning Yorkshire blog about the appeal of small museums, this is one of those - there are some genuinely terrible paintings where the artist has gone back and changed the head, or added a child to a family portrait, which is interesting from a social history perspective.
They also have some good Imari porcelain - stuff made in Arita, Japan for the European market and exported via the port of Imari, hence the name. There are also really bad renderings of Western paintings onto custom-ordered porcelain plates where the Japanese artists have become flummoxed by different artistic traditions of perspective etc. The V&A would have quite understandably binned them for space reasons, so I wouldn't have learned that fact.
I don't have a complete understanding but there's some interesting stuff about how the fortunes of Imari porcelain rose and fell because of economic and technological factors: first the Chinese got their act together and started trading internationally again, undercutting the Japanese, and then a factory in Meissen figured out the 'hard paste' technique that had been kept secret by the Chinese/Japanese - leading to situations where English porcelain makers were copying Japanese styles that had been 'Westernised' by the Japanese for export in the first place.
So yeah, let us buy some furniture and then come down!
