paul rice at adam partridge auctions

Paul Rice is a dealer of course. So he had more reason for that 'It will be valuable one day' syndrome than most of us have one time or another.
             There was a time when you could pick up studio pottery for 50p or a £1.00 at Boot Sales. Lots of us started that way. If you don't know the market you start thinking that anything could be valuable!
         In reality of course it only ever is a tiny fraction that is,

croker wrote:1500 pots amazing, i don't understand this type of hoarding but then i am not psychiatrist ,this is not collecting just accumulating, twice as many pots as the Victoria and Albert museum !!.

In Oliver Watson's Book of the V&A collection there were 743 pieces noted. But that was in 1990. There would be a lot more than that now, over 30 years later.

I realise there are probably more now through donations etc , perhaps i should have stated possibly twice as many .

It looks so much better in the catalogue than images of all the pots online and so I think it will probably sell exceptionally well on the day.

There are some that I would have bought from him, if he'd contacted me before putting them in auction.

His flat is stunning. A lifetimes collection.

Hi Dantheman, I would be doubtful if the V@A have more than 1000 British studio pots even now as they would not actively try to buy them, the only exceptions would be if something really important turned up but even that would be unlikely. If you talk to any museum curator they will tell you that they rely on gifts to fill the gaps. Most collections of studio pots such as the Bill Ismay, Shaw and Milner have gone to York and others to Cambridge.

Even when gifted Museums can be snooty about taking all of it. Noted collector and Cambridge Don John Shakespeare left all his notable to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. They selected what they wanted and sold the rest at Wooley and Wallis. A lot of it was in multi lots in that sale. One had over 100 pieces of pots by reasonable names in it!

hi, I agree most museums will not accept gifts of collections if the donor tries to attach any conditions for the display or disposal of the items. Most of the major museums already have comprehensive collections of most items .Unfortunately studio pottery seems to be the ugly duckling of the art world.

The York centre of Ceramic Art has undoubtedly got the biggest collection. Over 5500 pieces they say on their website. The Bill Ismay collection on its own was over 3000 if I remember rightly. All those pieces in a small terrace house.

The logistics of these single owner auctions must be quite daunting. Paul Rice lives in Central London, a long way from Macclesfield. Getting all that lot there in one piece must have been a reasonably expensive operation.
It takes long enough to wrap just One small piece when you sell it on Ebay. Makes me I only do a few bits here and there!

You mention Bill Ismay, a fascinating character , i never met him but he seemed interesting and by all accounts he was highly intelligent a good writer and an expert on studio pottery, yet he lived in quite primitive conditions with a outside toilet , no television, no heating and with little space to move around because of all the pots. He had some wonderful pots but also a lot of very ordinary pieces as well. He referred to himself as an incurable addict.

'Ordinary pieces', now there is a subject open to debate!
What makes one maker's work less ordinary than others?  Is the market the best judge of what is ordinary and what is excellent?
          Is the Studio pottery market too influenced by the combined strands of Coper/Rie Modernism and the Leach Anglo Oriental tradition?

Is an original design with mediocre potting better than a master potter knocking out a tired old form that Leach exhausted over 50 years ago?

croker wrote:You  mention Bill Ismay, a fascinating character , i never met him but he seemed  interesting and by  all accounts he was highly intelligent a good writer and an expert on studio pottery, yet he lived in quite primitive conditions with a outside toilet , no television, no heating and with little space to move around because of all the pots. He had some wonderful pots but also a lot of very ordinary pieces as well. He referred to himself as an incurable addict.

Bill was a librarian by profession and used to travel down from many of the private views that I staged on a Sunday towards the end of his life. That was from Wakefield to S.E. London, along with Tony, who was younger and did occasionally buy too. He would travel elsewhere of course, always armed with his large camera. He liked to take photographs of the exhibition, especially any pot that he bought and where it was positioned. I remember Tony telling me that he and some other friends tried to get Bill to have central heating installed and he even got a quote but when he realised how many pots you could get for the same money he decided against it.

Bill did not follow tastes or fashion and bought what he liked and only those pieces. To him, all of his pots were wonderful and none were ordinary.

dantheman wrote:Is an original design with mediocre potting better than a master potter knocking out a tired old form that Leach exhausted over 50 years ago?

Do you mean Grayson Perry v Edmond De Waal?

I don't think 'ordinary' is very hard to define in regards to studio pottery, Leach standard ware for instance we generally class as 'ordinary' whereas an exhibition piece such as a leaping salmon vase we tend to class as a fine art work, Lucie Rie made many fine pieces but also some pieces that are quite 'ordinary' to most collectors. I think everyone probably has their own ideas on what is an' ordinary' piece. I think Bill Ismay appeared happy with the objects he collected but by his own admission he was addicted and had to fill a pottery quota each year, this magpie form of collecting will inevitably end up with some of the pots collected being not of the highest 'quality 'and quite 'ordinary'.

philpot wrote:

dantheman wrote:Is an original design with mediocre potting better than a master potter knocking out a tired old form that Leach exhausted over 50 years ago?

Do you mean Grayson Perry v Edmond De Waal?

which one of those two is a master potter?

wEEEELLLLLL Grayson Perry fancies dressing as a Mistress Potter occasionally I bet Bernard never looked good in a frock!
All joking aside, Perry and De Waal in particular have become a good deal more than mere potters. They have become media personalities with a vastly wider audience than the minute Studio Pottery one. Their fame must add several zeros to the prices their works fetches.

Neither seem to have a thick old tatty jumper, letting the side down methinks. De Waal is often pictured in a suit and shirt and Perry looks like in a Alice in Wonderland.

Its part of the persona is it not. Grayson as eccentric media artist and De Waal as cerebral besuited author/artist.

croker wrote:I don't think 'ordinary' is very hard to define in regards to studio pottery, Leach standard ware for instance we generally class as 'ordinary' whereas an exhibition piece such as a leaping salmon vase we tend to class as a fine art work, Lucie Rie made many fine pieces but also some pieces that are quite 'ordinary' to most collectors. I think everyone probably has their own ideas on what is an' ordinary' piece. I think Bill Ismay appeared  happy with  the objects he collected but by his own admission he was addicted and had to fill a  pottery quota each year, this magpie form of collecting will inevitably end up with some of the pots collected being not of the highest 'quality 'and quite 'ordinary'.

It is totally incorrect to suggest that Bill "had to fill a pottery quota each year". What he had to do was attend every exhibition of potters, whose work he admired, get there first and have the opportunity to buy what he considered the best piece in the exhibition. On all of his visits to the Harlequin Gallery I can't remember him buying more than one piece from an exhibition. He always bought one piece though and might well have bought his final piece from a Mike Dodd exhibition that I held while he was in hospital. His colleague, Tony Hill, was sent down to photograph the exhibition and it was from these images that he chose the pot he bought and I posted to him.

philpot wrote:Its part of the persona is it not.  Grayson as eccentric media artist and   De Waal  as cerebral  besuited author/artist.

I am afraid that I object to your description of de Wally. He is a talentless plagiarist and the most obnoxious individual imaginable. An opinion shared by many people within the ceramics world.

get off the fence John