All fired-up
SALES of ceramics later this month and early next go a long way to illustrating the diversity that keeps collecting (and hopefully this column) so fascinating.
Who’d have thought, for example, that the same auctioneers who sold that 18th-century teapot for £480,000 (featured here) now have instructions to offer a private collection of bizarre Sixties pottery, the most expensive estimate among which is £400-600.
It follows, by 24 hours, a sale 70 miles away of another single-owner private collection, this one of early 20th century Chinese Republican porcelain with estimates ranging from £200 to £22,000 while, on April 3, a bowl made for an emperor could set a new world auction record. It is estimated to sell for in excess of £18.5 million.
I’ll list them chronologically, just in case you wish to place a bid.
Peter Wain, who died aged 72 at his Anglesey, North Wales, home in 2015, was a world authority on 20th century Chinese ceramics. His ground-breaking exhibitions in London, New York and elsewhere were instrumental in introducing Republican porcelain to the West.
It is pieces from his collection that will be sold first, by Chorley’s auctioneers (01452 344499) in Gloucester on Tuesday March 20.
Peter was born and raised in the Staffordshire Potteries and the last three generations of his family were managers at the Royal Doulton factory in Burslem. He even worked there himself from the age of 15 during his holidays from school and university. After leaving university, he taught for a while before joining the British Army as an officer in 1965, serving from 1969 to 1972, as a captain of the Hong Kong garrison headquarters in Kowloon.
The Cultural Revolution in Mainland China was in full swing when he arrived and riots had just taken place in Hong Kong.
Among his duties was monitoring the social changes taking place and he realised one of the best ways was through the arts and crafts coming out of China via the Chinese-owned arts and crafts friendship stores.
There were three in Hong Kong – one in Victoria and two in Kowloon – all owned by the Chinese government and known to be the bases for the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong.
Dressed as a tourist, Peter would wander innocently around the stores as Maosuited shop assistants followed him waving the “Little Red Book” and chanting “Chairman Mao is great, Chairman Mao is good”.
Peter invariably headed to the fourth floor to the arts and crafts department where he purchased many fine pieces at a modest cost, kick-starting a lifetime interest in 20th-century Chinese ceramics.
Peter also toured the antique stores of Hong Kong looking for the best of China’s recent productions, including any works relating to the post 1948 “New China”. By the end of his tour of duty in 1972, he had amassed a large collection. On leaving the army in 1980, he was sponsored by Royal Doulton to attend a one-year West Dean conservation course and naturally, he concentrated on Oriental porcelain. He and his wife, Susan, subsequently opened a shop in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, where they specialised in antique ceramics. The couple closed the shop in 1990 and moved to Anglesey in 2001. Highlight of the collection for sale is a set of four rectangular porcelain plaques by Bi Botao (18851961) representing the four seasons. He was a member of a group of the most accomplished porcelain artists known as “The Eight Friends of Zushan” who, between them, revitalised the Chinese porcelain industry after the political unrest.
The following day (Wednesday March 14) teapot supremos Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury (01722 424500) will sell 50-odd lots of Richard Parkinson porcelain. Many were “purchased” directly from Susan Parkinson, often with duty-free cigarettes brought back from France.
Susan was the design partner who, with her husband Richard, ran the pottery from an oasthouse near Ashford, in Kent. He was in charge of casting and firing, while she concentrated on her whimsical trademark monochromatic figurines. The business ran for a decade from 1951.
When the business wound up, a few of Richard’s unique moulds were purchased by Cinque Ports Pottery in Rye in Sussex, but it is believed most were destroyed. Output was never large, so surviving pieces are becoming increasingly rare.
Susan was born in 1925 in Calcutta, the daughter of a wine merchant. However, the family moved to Kent. Her talent as an artist was soon recognised, but it was also discovered that she was dyslexic. Undaunted, she found solace in her studies at art schools in Maidstone and Canterbury and subsequently at the Royal College of Art, where she studied sculpture under the great Frank Skeaping.
She married in 1949 and the couple’s first production was a humorous lion with EIIR monogram made in time for the Queen’s coronation in 1952.
Their tour de force was a charming group of five theatrical figurines depicting respectively Dame Margot Fonteyn dressed in her greatest role as Ondine; Vivien Leigh as Cleopatra; Sir Laurence Olivier as Henry V; Paul Robeson as Othello and Sir John Gielgud as Hamlet.
The 12-inch (30.5cm) standing figures were commissioned by another pottery which had been unable to produce them in earthenware.
The Parkinsons were to be paid £2 each for those made in porcelain and production began in 1958. However, the slipcasting process using different moulds for the component parts proved complex and they were soon discontinued.
In 1959, those that were made retailed at the Design Centre in London for 10 guineas (£10.10 shillings, or £10.50) each or 40 guineas (£42) the set. The seven examples in Woolley & Wallis’s sale are each estimated at £400-600.
Over the years the brick kiln the couple built produced an amusing line-up of caricatures and creatures, some of which can now be seen in the V&A. However, the couple divorced in 1962 and without her husband’s support, the business closed. She suffered prolonged bouts of depression, but in 1963 she began teaching art to great acclaim at a specialist school for dyslexic children, retiring in 1985. In 1992, she and two of her school colleagues founded the Arts Dyslexia Trust, which continues today. She died in 2012.
And then, if you have any money left, you could bid for the so-called H.M. Knight Pink-Ground Falangcai Bowl, to be sold at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong on April 3, estimate “Refer dept” or “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it”. Quietly, the firm is hoping for a record-busting price in excess of HK$200 million (£18.5m).