Isn't this just posh dinnerware? William De Morgan: Sublime Symmetry review

Guildhall Art Gallery, London
The Victorian ceramicist wanted to create a utopian art of abstract symmetries. But his mirrored plates – full of mermaids, dragons and peacocks – are more home decor than high art

Mathematics has been inspiring art ever since a Neolithic designer drew a circle on the ground with a stick and it became the basis for an arrangement of stones on Salisbury Plain.

So Victorian ceramicist William De Morgan was hardly the first artist to embrace geometry and calculation – but he did have a better grasp of advanced mathematics than most. The Guildhall Art Gallery’s promising exploration of a potter’s mind reveals that numbers were in De Morgan’s blood. His father, Augustus, was one of the most acclaimed mathematicians of his age, advancing algebra and tutoring Ada Lovelace, who went on to invent the idea of computer programming.

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