Vintage View: Potteries from Cornwall
St Ives in Cornwall, has been an internationally recognised area for all forms of the decorative arts for well over a century, most especially during the first three-quarters of the 20th century.
Established through a tangled history of pilchard fishing, the railway and the consequent resort status from the late 1800s, any reference to St Ives peaks the interest of a reverent following of fine art collectors.
A highly celebrated, shifting colony of painters, potters, weavers and sculptors
created worldwide fascination for the already jaw dropping lovely harbour.
This Southwest toe of Cornwall has cultural yearnings and summer weather that suggests a bright digit of the continent that wants to dance down to the Bay of Biscay.
The father of modern British pottery, Bernard Leach (1887-1979) and his soul chum Shoji Hamada (1894-1978), had their studio at Higher Stennack. From 1920 to today, Leach Pottery promotes traditional economic pieces of functional pottery in salt glazes and restrained slip-wares.
The pieces have a quiet, understated power — there’s a perfection about them. The Leach philosophy elevated the techniques and intensified the vision of the artist potter and had a seismic and lasting influence on western studio pottery.
Through life’s little ironies, Leach’s early modest creations primarily celebrating Sung dynasty peasant wares of Korea and Japan, now achieve gallery level prices beyond most means.
The studio is still in operation producing Raku style vessels of all kinds, if you’re holidaying in the area (there’s even a Tate St Ives, for the devoted). Leach’s wife Janet, son David OBE (1911-2005), and grandsons John, Jeremy and Simon are all celebrated potters and worth following up. Leach Pottery itself is run by the Bernard Leach Trust, still based in Stennack.
Take a look at the newly-thrown, but faithful Leach Standard Ware (earthenware or porcelain), clean lines and gloriously functional, just as the master intended. From €14 for a cream pourer (plus P&P).
Selected vintage Leach Pottery pieces are available from the 1950s through to the 1970s, check the catalogue, leachpottery.com.
With a real groove now starting for the 1970s, St Ives boasts another, in this case, extinguished pottery worth exploring as a vintage junkie. This one is still affordable with a relatively small window of its production of just over 20 years.
If I were completely honest, aesthetically this contender is more tickling than Leach Pottery, which has a certain, over familiar look, followed and interpreted all over Ireland and Britain.
No one could mistake Troika (1962-1983) for anything else. It’s downright lumpen, outrageously ornamental, but so bravely original in form and finish, you just have to look again and smile. Deeply sophisticated or hilarious Euro-trash naive, you decide, Troika rarely disappoints.
Founded by the triumvirate (troika) of artists Leslie Illsley, potter Benny Sirota and Swedish architect Jan Thompson in 1963, Troika was unashamedly ‘arty’ pottery intended primarily for display and to rudely goose the established, rather well behaved Leach-style, St Ives pots.
Despite her initial interest and investment, Thompson departed the project in 1965. Good enough to finally end up in the V&A, Troika was a wild success in Heal’s, Liberty’s of London and made an excellent, quirky buy for bolder tourists to St Ives. Plaques, tiles, vases, lamp bases and tableware bearing indecipherable abstract blocky imprints in curious colours, teased the imagination. Inspiration ran from post modernist paintings to the script and symbols of ancient civilisations.
The two friends initially rented out of a former pottery (Powell & Wells) at Wheal Dream near Porthgwidden beach, now the St Ives Museum, recycling old blanks from the last tenant to experiment with glazes, and quickly gained attention for their unfettered creativity.
The work was hand-built from slabs of clay in a cheese-soft state taken from plaster moulds. Rough or smoothly glazed, it’s hefty in the hand, with thick walls and a monumental feel, its vases read as sculpture in Anvils and Coffins. The fabulous Chimney vases feature a small chimney-like stack and like all Troika, every piece is individual.
In 1970, the Troika team left St Ives for the heavily artistic town of Newlyn, south of Penzance, settling at Fradgan Place, an 18th-century salting house. Newlyn period pieces are therefore, post 1970s in date. Sadly, despite early success, within 13 years the company had folded as demand fell everywhere in Britain for folksy pottery.
Prices for Troika start at around €20 for a double egg cup (plentiful and produced for Heal’s en masse) to €100-€150 for a late cylinder shaped vase or cubist marmalade pot with an Aztec like design. Next up would be flat circular Wheel vases (my favourite and full of mysterious personality), starting at €250 and rising to €2-€3,000 for a great rarity such as an early white work by Illsley made and marked in St Ives.
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