Three floors of clay — Ancient American, Italian maiolica, Meissen porcelain — and a wheel you can sit down at.
One of very few museums in the world devoted entirely to ceramics, founded in 1984 by George and Helen Gardiner around their own collection, and extended by KPMB in 2006.
It holds around 5,000 objects and it is a specialist collection of real quality rather than a general museum with a pottery room.
The collections
Ancient American — the ground floor. Ceramics from the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Nazca and Moche cultures, from around 3000 BC onwards, including Maya figurines from Jaina and Peruvian portrait vessels. This is the strongest section and the one people do not expect.
Italian Renaissance maiolica — tin-glazed earthenware, brilliantly coloured, painted with narrative scenes. The Gardiner’s holding is among the best in North America.
English delftware and European porcelain — Meissen, Vienna, Sèvres, Chelsea, including the Hans Syz Collection of Meissen and a room of eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte figures which are extraordinarily strange.
Chinese and Japanese porcelain, including Yixing teapots.
Contemporary — the museum collects and commissions actively, and the modern galleries are not an afterthought.
Clay classes
The museum runs drop-in and booked clay classes in a studio on site, for adults and children, including hand-building and wheel-throwing. This is unusual for a museum of this kind and it is genuinely good.
Practicalities
Ticketed and modest, with free entry on Wednesday evenings at various points — check the current arrangement.
Ninety minutes is right. There is a good café, Clay, with a terrace onto Queen’s Park.
Directly across the road from the ROM at Museum station, which makes the pairing obvious — though doing both properly in one day is a great deal of museum.
The University of Toronto campus, Philosopher’s Walk and the Ontario Legislature in Queen’s Park are all within a few minutes.
More Museums
Royal Ontario Museum
Canada's largest museum, with a Libeskind crystal crashing through the front of it that the city has never agreed about.
Art Gallery of Ontario
Frank Gehry's only Canadian building, in the neighbourhood he grew up in, holding the largest collection of Canadian art anywhere.
Aga Khan Museum
A white granite box by Fumihiko Maki holding Islamic art, in a park in suburban Toronto, and worth the journey.