It’s a hard glaze, right?
Doulton offers collectors so much more than the bear necessities
IT’S NO secret that prices for Doulton ceramics – Royal or otherwise (I’ll come back to that) – are down woefully on where they were a few years ago – but just occasionally a gem turns up in the saleroom that wows collectors and gives hope to those of us sitting on stuff that’s worth nowhere near what we paid for it.
So it was last week when this appealing salt-glazed stoneware figure of a brown bear stealing honey from an upturned beehive hit the auction block.
It had been uncovered in the undergrowth of a neglected back garden of a house whose occupant had passed away leaving his family the job of clearing the property.
Speculation was that the artist responsible for making it was Mark Marshall (I’ll come back to him) but the only mark impressed inside the upturned hive, was for the Doulton Lambeth, dating it to the late 19th century.
The discovery excited Doulton collectors and created much pre-sale interest. Estimated at £2,000-£3,000, the 2ft 5in (75cm) high figure sold for £8,000 (plus the 20% auctioneer’s fee).
Was it by Marshall? Well probably, but we’ll never know for sure and the buyer, a private individual living in South Yorkshire, couldn’t have cared less. He said he bought it just because he liked it.
How the thing survived in the first place makes the bear special enough, but that’s the joy of stoneware. The fact that so much of what was once used only for utilitarian purposes remains today – with the exception of rare 17th examples – is an indication of its durability and of the massive output of the factories all around the country where it was produced.
Stoneware was made first in the Middle Ages, probably in Germany, following the discovery that when clay is fired to temperatures as high as 1,4000 Centigrade (2,5000 Fahrenheit) the body becomes vitrified and therefore waterproof and frostproof.
When it was discovered – probably by accident – that common salt thrown into the kiln at the right moment instantly vapourised and coated the pots being fired with a glass-hard glaze,
A Martinware “Wally Bird” tobacco jar, 11½ inches (29.5cm) high, inscribed R.W. Martin and Bros. London Southall 8.5.1903. Sold for £9,500 despite being restored. A “grotesque” stoneware “Wally Bird” by Robert Martin. Sold for £13,500. production took off.
John Dwight, who established a factory producing salt-glaze stoneware in Fulham, was probably the first manufacturer to exploit the discovery successfully in the UK.
A farmer’s son, he was born in Oxford and studied law, physics and chemistry at the university there.
Following the Restoration in 1660, he moved to Chester to work as secretary to the new bishop, a post he held until 1665. From there, he moved to Wigan as registrar of the diocese, but where he also set up a laboratory to experiment on clay.
Clearly encouraged by his findings, Dwight subsequently founded the Fulham pottery, where he claimed he had the facilities to supply the whole of England with its requirements for salt-glazed stoneware.
Others had their eye on the market too. Factories sprang up in London at Southwark, Vauxhall, Lambeth and Mortlake and subsequently, Bristol, Staffordshire, Nottingham, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and many other centres.
John Doulton (1793-1873) was an apprentice at the Dwight’s Fulham works and in 1815, he joined Martha Jones at the Union Pottery in Vauxhall Walk. In 1827, he moved to start the Lambeth Pottery with John Watts, his business partner since 1815, making salt-glazed stoneware bottles, drainpipes, sanitary ware, and, being acid-resistant, vessels for the growing chemical industry.
A boom in housebuilding, improvements in sanitation and the provision of piped water, the greater use of ink with the introduction of the penny post in 1839 and the easier transportation of aerated drinks and potted food boosted the need for their products in a relatively short period of time.
Doulton’s son, Henry, (1820-1897) joined the business aged 15 and, with Watts retiring in 1854, the firm, by now one of the largest in London, restyled itself as Doulton & Co, opening factories in Dudley in the West Midlands and St Helens, Merseyside, to cope with demand.
Henry was an innovator. He introduced steam power to the industry and in the 1850s, recognising the potential of saltglazed stoneware as a medium in the growing appeal of art pottery, he became a mentor and patron to the nearby Lambeth School of Art, founded in 1854.
In the 1860s, he commissioned the students to design and make a frieze for his factory’s new extension, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and encouraged them to produce experimental decorative pieces shown at both the Paris Exhibition and the Great Exhibition in 1851.
By 1871, he had launched an art pottery studio at Lambeth, offering design work to students such as Arthur Barlow and his sisters Florence and Hannah, Frank Butler, Mark Marshall, Eliza Simmance, and George Tinworth – all names that excite today’s collectors.
Doulton never looked back. It acquired a factory in Nile Street Burslem, in the Staffordshire Potteries in 1878 where fancy bone china and its famous line of figures and character jugs were produced.
The firm became Royal Doulton in 1901 when it was given the Royal Warrant following a visit by Edward VII and Queen Mary. It continues today, but under much-reduced circumstances following the tough times for the pottery industry at the turn of the current century.
Mark Marshall (1842-1913) followed in his stonemason father’s footsteps, working in a local yard after training at Lambeth School of Art, where he probably met fellow student Robert Wallace Martin (of “Wally bird” fame).
Mark’s first love was pottery, however, and he is known to have assisted Robert Martin and his brothers who made their name producing gothic revival stoneware art pottery, which collectors know today as Martinware.
The brothers’ “Wally bird” tobacco jars modelled as grotesque crow-like creatures fetch eye-watering prices.
Another fellow Lambeth student George Tinworth (1843-1913) was undoubtedly a further influence. A greengrocer’s son, he also worked in Doulton art pottery studio and is known for his amusing stoneware studies of mice and frogs in human activities, he called them “humoresques”, as well as more serious public fountains, friezes, pulpits and other ecclesiastical commissions and memorials.
Buying and collecting pieces by Marshall, the Martin brothers and Tinworth today requires drainpipedeep pockets.