Blue Milk: Mary II, porcelain, and the queen’s body at the Hampton Court Dairy

Iris Moon’s talk explores the porcelain and delftware collection of Mary II (1662-1794) and how these artificial blue and white objects shaped the image of the queen and co-ruler of England with William III. After taking the throne in 1689, Mary II became actively involved in the extensive renovation of Hampton Court, the dilapidated Tudor residence. This included the creation of spaces designed for the queen’s pleasure, in particular the dairy in the Water Gallery, constructed out of the Tudor Watergate, a former royal retreat. Dairies in the Early Modern period, as the work of Meredith Martin has suggested, were not only gendered retreats of pleasure and privacy, but strategic sites of power. This presentation argues that these sites, premised upon an endless flow of milk and the promise of maternal fecundity and provisioning, also functioned as the architectural means through which female rulers worked through the anxieties of dynastic succession and the pressures to reproduce an heir. Bringing feminist theories of the body to bear upon the rare survivals from Mary II’s now destroyed dairy, such as a blue and white earthenware tile in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moon looks at how Mary’s extensive ceramics collection of Dutch earthenware and Asian export porcelain shaped her public persona after Mary II’s sudden death in 1694. More than this, it created a surrogate, artificial body of blue and white that became mapped onto memories of the queen.