John Maltby

A transitional Maltby candlestick. I think it was made after Stoneshill but before his current work; when he switched from making functional pottery to handbuilt figural pieces. The hanging fish are the same design that he still uses.

Nice!
We visited John Maltby in circa 1995, and bought a few of the more pottery pieces he had left. He had a heart attack late 1994 if I remember rightly, and he found the sheer physical work of making the formal pots just too much for him. Hence the transition to sculptural pieces.
            This one does look quite early. That glaze is somewhat reminiscent of the functional pieces.

Classic piece by John Maltby, Stoneshill Pottery.

Maltby dish

Nice. Is that a Charity shop find?

No, courtesy of SP’s Harlequin Gallery :)

I don’t know if it’s true, but apparently the Maltbys sold well at the Adam Partridge auction today because a rumour went round that he’d died! Someone told Maltby and he laughed.

Got some of the Tony Laverick.
If you look back at the prices of Maltby in the Cheffins auctions a few years ago the prices achieved at Partridges were not surprising. Its the large painterly vases (especially the spade ones) and the exceptional large figurative pieces with character that fetch the very high prices. Hence the particular two in this auction. Looking at most of the Maltby prices. they were fairly bang on what you would have expected given his price history at auction.

The Maltby on the front of the catalogue was exceptionally nice

Maltby...

Interesting. It looks like a slightly transition period piece. He was a David Leach apprentice of course, and his early Stoneshill work is very strongly Leach orientated. The underlying brown glaze here is one he frequently that he used later at Stoneshill. The decoration and the glaze seems slightly diffident. His later painterly work is STRONG and BOLD and that is why people like it. This seems as though he is slightly searching in directions, which is probably what he was doing. Dating, that is difficult, John Maltby was a very individualistic potter, and attempted many different things. Mid 70's? Somewhere vaguely around there. It does not have the bold confidence of his later work, but has lost most of the Leach style.
The personal mark on the front is unusual. But then mature Maltby was a very quirky and individualistic potter, which is part of his appeal. So what if he put stamp on somewhere different? If someone was going to fake Maltby, I think it would not be in this sort of style. The value of his work is in the painterly piece. It would just not worth bothering value wise in faking this piece.

Definitely Maltby, and I agree that it looks transitional, when he was turning away from standard ware to Art pottery, but I don’t know the dates of the transitions. At one point he was too poor to buy clay and made a lot of paper collages. Then he became too ill to throw and turned to figurines. I’ll ask a collector who has hundreds of Maltbys if he can give us a rough timeline

This one is a piece of his standard ware and has a similar flower stamp. Maybe it was simply decoration -

https://pin.it/sp5o7v6fc3mztr

He had a heart attack in the early  in the mid 90's, which basically made him physically incapable of the hard manual work of  his 'painterly' work. We actually visited him in  when we first started collecting studio pottery about 1995. We bought 3 pieces he had. Some of the last of his painterly pottery.

Example of his mark

Photo.