BRITISH ART POTTERY
An exceptional sale of Burmantofts pottery at Woolley & Wallis reveals a high point of late 19th- century British ceramics, says
Sometimes, a collection comes up for auction that is so special even the sale catalogue is snapped up as a future collectable. This is most likely at June’s sale of Burmantofts faience pottery, says Woolley & Wallis’s Michael Je ery – it’s the most extensive private collection of the Leeds-made pottery ever to come to market. ‘I’ve been running British art pottery sales for 20 years and was stunned when I saw the collection; it was so complete,’ says Je ery. ‘ The pieces were beautifully displayed all around the owners’ house and included items I’d never seen before. The huge variety ranges from grotesque creatures, chargers, vases and clocks, to functional pieces such as tiles and jardinières, conservatory stoves and stick stands.’
The anonymous private owners gathered the collection of some 500 pieces over 25 years, but now want to sell, bringing art pottery fanciers out in force. ‘ The appeal of the sale crosses several collecting fields, including Burmantofts, grotesque creatures, tiles and lustre pottery,’ says Je ery. ‘ Typically, Burmantofts pottery doesn’t usually come up in any great volume at auction, so this is an opportunity to see a remarkably comprehensive overview of the firm’s production.’
Encouragingly, many of the estimates placed on the 300 lots (some lots comprise multiple items) are very a ordable, starting in the low hundreds for various ‘grotesques’, vases and chargers. Even the star piece, a rare monumental jardinière and stand
decorated with a frieze of peacocks, is a relatively modest £4,000–£6,000. It has fantastic provenance too, having once been part of the seminal Harriman Judd collection of British art pottery, sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2001.
The Burmantofts story is part of the rich patchwork of British ceramics history – a producer of art pottery, which, by the turn of the 20th century, graced mantelpieces, dressers, dining tables and walls across the land. ‘ In the second half of the 19th century, as the middle classes expanded and began to style their homes, the demand for decorative pottery and tiles grew, and small satellite pottery studios run by artist-potters and aspiring managers, sprang up all over the country,’ explains Je ery. Big players such as Burmantofts, Doulton & Co, Minton and Pilkington’s Lancastrian all got in on the act, while there was a niche for smaller makers too – Martin Brothers, Moorcroft, William De Morgan, and Della Robbia, for example.
Founded in Leeds in 1842, the Burmantofts pottery was well known for making bricks and architectural terracotta wares before a new owner, James Holroyd, shook things up c1880. He established an art pottery studio within the firm to make hand-thrown and hand- decorated ceramics, including tiles, using the same earthenware clay that comprised those bread-and-butter terracotta pipes. No doubt he was emulating Doulton & Co, the leading manufacturer of industrial ceramics in the 19th century, who in the early 1860s established a department to create highly ornamental salt- glazed stoneware. The studio, referred to as Doulton Lambeth today, took on graduates of the Lambeth School of Art to help decorate their popular ceramics, including well-known artists George Tinworth and the Barlow siblings, Hannah and Florence.
It was a golden era for Burmantofts. Designers were brought in and imaginations could fly. Some of the earliest pieces were hand-thrown and hand- decorated, using the French barbotine technique of painting the pottery with liquid slip. The AngloPersian range, designed by Leonard King and launched in 1887, paid homage to the Middle Eastern- style works of leading Arts and Crafts ceramics designer, William De Morgan. Anglo- Persian H& A JULY 2017 107