The late Anthony Hoyte was one of the country’s leading authorities on Derby porcelain and acted as a consultant to Neales on Derby for nearly 30 years.
Known in partic-ular for identifying the artist-decorators whose miniature masterpieces were such a feature of the Derby factory’s production, he first showed interest in the field as a result of his mother collecting Royal Crown Derby.
His own interest lay in late 18th century and particularly early 19th century Derby porcelain, and pieces in his collection include works by some of the great artist-decorators such as Boreman, Billingsley, the Brewers, ‘Quaker’ Pegg, Robertson and many more.
As friends and colleagues at Neales explained, Hoyte favoured Derby in the grand manner, building a collection over 35 years that contains works such as Long Tom and campana vases, among the largest pieces made by the factory during the Regency period.
Hoyte’s scholarship led him to write for a number of periodicals and he also wrote the foreword for John Twitchett’s Derby Porcelain, first published in 1980. This pairing of John Twitchett and Anthony Hoyte was instrumental in forming the steering committee responsible for the founding of the Derby Porcelain International Society, of which he was its first chairman.
Amongst his favourite projects he catalogued the Charles Norman Collection, one of the most important collections of late 18th century Derby porcelain in the world.
Derby Day is now in May
THE distillation of a life of taste, dedication to a collecting field and unique expertise. This rare confluence of qualities may be seen this Thursday, May 1, when Neales of Nottingham present the 163-lot single-owner collection of one of their own cataloguers.
