A collection of British art pottery and fin de siecle decorative arts

Magazine Antiques, June, 2008 by Max Donnelly

Over four decades two English collectors filled their house with British art pottery and fin de siecle furniture and decorative arts, presenting the whole with a theatrical flourish that reflects the creative partnership of an actress trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and her late husband, an art college graduate. Recently, the surviving owner explained how a serious back injury more than forty years ago had forced her to find an alternative career; gripped by what she remembers as the "fervour of Britishness" of the 1960s, she and her husband decided to open a stall selling royal commemorative ceramics and eventually came to deal in nineteenth-century majolica. Their own collecting began by happenstance one Friday afternoon in 1962 when they learned that the George, a public house, was being demolished:

This had been my husband's "local" when he was an art student in Croydon [South London]. It was filled with wonderful etched glass, so we jumped into a cab and on arrival asked the foreman if we could buy it; he said we could have the lot for [pounds sterling]10. When we returned with a van we were horrified to discover that the builders, ordered to "finish by Friday," had set the George on fire. So we called the fire brigade!

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They piled the sodden panels in the bedroom of their small flat, where they remained for three years, until they bought a double-fronted Victorian villa south of London. Although grandly built in 1895 for the speculative builder who had constructed most of the street, the conservatory had been destroyed during World War II, and the previous owner, an architect, had removed many original features, leaving a blank canvas.

The pub panels were installed in various rooms, creating an inviting and ebullient atmosphere (see Figs. 4, 5). Next came paneling from an Edwardian draper off the Tottenham Court Road, fitted into the entrance hall; followed, in the kitchen, by transfer-printed tiles from a Yorkshire butcher's shop--from the Animals on the Farm series designed by William Wise (1847-1889) for Minton and Company in Stoke-on-Trent in the 1880s. The demolition of a local supermarket dairy yielded tiles of 1880 to 1900 for the bathroom (see Fig. 5).

Their initial interest in art pottery was largely inspired by neighbors who collected it along with Victorian paintings and stained glass: "When we visited them in the evenings we would admire the softly lit, glowing colours. We were bewitched by it all," recalls the collector. One of their earliest acquisitions was a pair of minstrel tile panels made by Morris and Company (Figs. 3a, 3b), (1) the decoration derived ultimately from twelve designs for tiles and stained glass devised by William Morris (1834-1896) before 1865 and possibly redrawn in the 1870s by his then assistant, Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919. (2) Each panel is inscribed on the back with the name of an early, or perhaps the original, owner, Henry Currie Marillier (1865-1951), who became the managing director of Morris and Company in 1905, around the time these tiles were made. They were possibly display items in the firm's Oxford Street shop, whose address and the words "Not to be sold" appear on the back.

Daniel Cottier (1838-1891), who briefly worked for Morris and Company, established his own firm making art furniture, stained glass, and ceramics in 1869, and in 1873 it became one of the first British art furnishing companies to establish a branch in New York City. Very few tiles, plaques, or chargers by Cottier and Company survive. The example in Figure 8 bear's similarities not only to other Cottier chargers and stained glass, 3 but also to the hearth tiles depicting Guinevere installed by the firm in the hallway of Glenview, the John Bond Trevor housein Yonkers, New York, about 1876. (4)

Far more plentiful were the ceramics made by William De Morgan. The important baluster vase in Figure 18, decorated by Fred Passenger in what De Morgan described as Persian colors, belonged to Louis Samuel Montagu (1869-1927), second Baron Swaythling, and may well have been among the items he loaned to the De Morgan memorial exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1917. (5) It is a superb example of De Morgan's rhythmic two-dimensional pattering, so kindred in sprit to Morris's textile and wallpaper, so kindred in spirit to Morris's textile and wallpaper designs. In another room, the collectors assembled a large group of Persian-inspired pottery produced by Wilcox and Company in Leeds from the late 1870s under the name Burmantofts pottery (see Fig. 6). Although Burmantofts is sometimes dismissed as "the poor man's De Morgan," and though great admirers of De Morgan's color, the collectors considered that the makers of Burmantofts often handles color better and more precisely than De Morgan. Writing in the British Architect and Northern Engineer in 1881, T. Raffles Davison felt likewise: "Those aesthetes who can get pitched up high with exquisite sensitive emotion of colour, will do well to take a bit of 'Burmantofts Waew home with them and sit and look at it. It would last them a long time." (6)