"When you enter the shop… you find yourself in a dim-lit passage
with crowded shelves of stoneware jugs carved into leering,
laughing, grinning and ogling heads, jostling with the most
impossible, and most fascinating, pot birds with strangely
anthropological expressions…"
This is how Holbrook Jackson described his first visit to a
small pottery dealership situated in Brownlow Street, Holborn in
1910. He was not the first, nor the last, to be captivated by the
eccentric creations of the four Martin Brothers.
Today, Martin Brothers pottery forms a unique collecting niche
and has become one of the most recognisable and interesting areas
of the antiques market.
Above: the men, their birds and their beards in the
workplace. This c.1910 photograph on wood depicting (from left to
right) Walter, Robert and Edwin Martin, sold for £380 at Woolley
& Wallis in November 2006.
Production began in 1873 with a kiln at the family home in
Fulham and expanded in 1877 with a move to a disused soap works on
the canal on Havelock Road in Southall, where sporadic production
would continue until 1923.
Eldest brother Robert Wallace modelled the figures, Walter fired
the kiln, mixed the glazes and threw the pots, Edwin was chiefly
the decorator while youngest brother Charles ran the City shop -
badly. Wildly eccentric, even by the standards of his siblings, he
hated to part with any of the wares, hid the best of them under the
floorboards, and turned away many a prospective customer.
Eventually, the shop burned down, the brothers lost their stock,
and Charles his sanity.
There was a less-than-commercial approach to production. A
single high-temperature kiln was fired just once a year without
protective saggars which meant every pot was in direct contact with
the flames. The result was a very unpredictable output - on one
occasion, only one good pot emerged from an entire year's work, but
the pieces that did emerge were Victorian art pottery at its best -
a vast range of wares often beautifully formed and decorated,
sometimes whimsical, sometimes comical, sometimes dark.
Collecting studio ceramics is often associated with hunting down
rare combinations of shape and colour from a documented range of
products. Martinware collectors are attracted by a combination of
humour with menace and dreams with nightmares that cannot be
separated from the extraordinary circumstances in which the pottery
was created.
Robert Wallace's most coveted creations are his Gothic-inspired
anthropomorphic bird jars, glazed in the subdued palette of browns,
greens, greys and blues so distinctive of Martinware. These
characters from Victorian London (the earliest is dated 1880) were
professional types, public figures and local waifs and strays
modelled in avian form and have become iconic objects in the
history of British decorative arts.
But, it is not all about the birds.
Martinware collecting can itself be split into a number of niche
markets with some collectors focusing upon the less iconic but
equally evocative grotesques (the face jugs, the musical imps and
the wonderful spoon warmers), the thrown and incised vessels that
offer the full Martinware experience at lesser price levels or the
appealing range of miniatures and gourds.
Martinware has a surprisingly long and enduring collecting
history and the most engaging of these ceramic eccentricities have
long been beyond the pocket of the working man. Surviving 1913
receipts list a tiny Martin bird available at 8s 6d (421/2p), with
larger bird jars from 37 shillings to 55 shillings each
(£1.85-£2.75).
On the same receipt is a quote from a recent copy of The
Times: "Someday, collectors will ransack the town for Martin's
artistic stonewares." Prophetic words indeed.
Size, species, date, colouring and condition are all important
ingredients when assessing a Martinware bird, but character is key.
Collecting Martinware is very much a love affair and it is easy to
be seduced by a mischievous wink, a knowing smile or a sly sideways
glance.
But, while there are many who covet these trophies of Victorian
art pottery, they have become prohibitively expensive, with prices
over £15,000 now commonplace (although damaged examples make
less).
In the early 2000s, Michael Jeffery, decorative arts specialist
at Salisbury auctioneers Woolley & Wallis negotiated the
private sale of two large birds of 1896 aping the Victorian
politicians Gladstone and Disraeli for a record £150,000. He
estimates that there are perhaps up to 20 collectors worldwide for
whom owning a menagerie of Martin birds is both a desirable and
financially feasible pursuit.
Accordingly there tends to be much more action at more
affordable price levels. Increasingly the focus is upon the
mid-price ranges (including the grotesque spoon-warmers, the
two-sided face jugs, vessels incised with birds and fish) and the
pieces that provide the entry level for new collectors from £150
upwards.
Gourds, both full-size and miniature are a collecting field in
their own right with the best examples capable of springing
four-figure sums.
Above: a pair of vases incised with fish, jellyfish and an
eel, in shades of ochre and green on a blue ground incised '10-
1903 Martin Bros, London & Southall', 6in (15.5cm) high - £3400
at Woolley & Wallis of Salisbury on October 2005.
There are three key dates in the modern history of Martinware
collecting. In 1978 British art pottery specialist Richard
Dennis put on a landmark exhibition, The Martin Brothers
Potters, at Sotheby's Belgravia, showing 719 pieces from
miniatures to big birds.
In 1995 David Rago and Phillip Chasen of New York's Gallery 532
put on a show titled The Martin Brothers. The 97 items
include the Gladstone and Disraeli birds recently sold by private
treaty for £150,000.
In 2001 Sotheby's New York sold the Harriman Judd collection, an
encyclopaedic collection of British art pottery assembled with
extraordinary speed by two Californians, Allen Harriman and Edward
Judd in the 1970s and '80s. In less than a dozen years their
Spanish-style villa in the Hollywood hills was populated by more
than 3000 pieces, including a $1m collection of Martin
Brothers.
The Martin Brothers, Potters by Malcolm Haslam, Richard
Dennis, ISBN-10: 090368506X
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