Decorative Art

Alongside the Americana offered in the New York salerooms earlier this month, there was a strong representation of early English ceramics. Sotheby’s January 20 sale of the pottery collection of Harriet Carlton Goldweitz was followed the next day by Christie’s auction of the Mrs J. Insley Blair collection, which included some key Staffordshire productions alongside its blue chip American furnishings.

A Susie Cooper vase sold for £3850 on eBay on January 13. The vase, which measures just over 12in (30cm) high, is decorated with a hunter in a loin cloth stalking two deer or ibex close to a stylised tree – an unrecorded design of around 1931 or ’32. Similar pieces are known from a publicity shot taken in the 1930s although most were thought to have been destroyed during a hit on the factory during the Blitz.

A funding package worth £7m has been agreed allowing construction to begin on a new Wedgwood Museum in the heart of the Potteries at the company’s Barlaston headquarters.

ALONGSIDE, Tom Jones, Bruce Forsyth and the Ashes winning cricket team, the New Year’s honours list featured Richard Dennis.

Two fine lots of 17th century English pewter greeted New Year bidders in the country.

Ninety-one-year-old John Werner Kluge is the stuff of the American Dream – a German immigrant who amassed his fortune in the States buying radio and television stations.

The niche market appears to be the driving force in silver sales today.

“Someday,” wrote The Times in August 1912, “collectors will ransack the town for Martin’s artistic stonewares.”

When the Troika pottery in Newlyn closed its doors in 1983 its moulds were secured for posterity, not in a local museum or the collection of a Troika devotee but in a garden shed in Northumberland.

At first glance there’s nothing very exciting at all about this Prattware pot lid.

A SINGLE vendor has been trying to sell very convincing fake silver smallwork through auction rooms in central and southwest England.

Medieval French silver is not a plentiful commodity. Much of it did not escape the great post-Revolutionary meltdown, but one piece that got away was the late Gothic reliquary casket that featured in Sotheby’s works of art auction in London on June 8.

As celebrations abound for the most famous of all seamen, another great British admiral was being remembered in spectacular fashion at the Nottingham auction rooms of Mellors & Kirk on June 16. The subject of a fierce engagement between collectors was the so-called Rodney Jug.

Moorcroft miniatures are a collecting field in their own right. Anyone who owns a copy of Paul Atterbury’s book Moorcroft will be aware from the sleeve illustration just how many of the factory patterns were produced in miniature, often requiring an extra delicacy of touch on the part of the designer, potter and decorator.

YOU wait forever then two come along at once. The sentiment so often expressed about London buses could equally well apply to rare early 18th century Continental porcelain teapots.

ENGLISH POTTERY SALESTHE products of the Staffordshire potteries from blue-printed tablewares to cottage chimney ornaments and Toby jugs to ironstone services, were the subject of a 356-lot sale at Bonhams’ Knightsbridge (20/12% buyer’s premium) back on May 11.

PERHAPS the rarest of all Beswick’s ouput is the Spirit of Whitfield.

Ealing Council are appealing for information on the theft of 16 pieces of Martin Brothers pottery from Southall Library in the early hours of Monday, May 23.

AMONG the great grails of Maling collecting are the so-called Urbino style vases: 16in (41cm) high exhibition pieces c.1945 decorated in relief with a celebrated moment from classical mythology by Lucien Boullemeir to a design by Norman Carling. The scene shows Perseus holding aloft the Medusa’s head to petrify the sea monster and save the beautiful Andromeda, who is chained to the rocky shore.

AFTER the mixed response to the Christopher Dresser material offered at Lyon & Turnbull (Buyers Premium 17.5%), it was left to the catalogue of decorative arts, consigned by various vendors, to provide the auctioneers with their biggest number of the day.