Lunchtime Reading

Although my new job (5 days a week, with far too much of that spent looking at a computer screen) may have dampened my blogging ardor, it has also given me access to a library full of Poole Pottery knowledge. This ad appeared in "The Pottery Gazette and Glass Trade Review" in 1932.  
Over several lunch breaks so far I've thumbed 3 or 4 years worth of the Gazette, but there's another couple of decades of back issues to keep me busy and then I get started on "Tableware International".

Potpourri

I found this potpourri jar on eBay at the end of last year.  It's painted in XK pattern by a decorator whose mark (below) I've seen several times before on pots from the first half of the 1920's, but who isn't listed in the reference books.  The pot is relatively early (mid 1920's), and though made from the usual red earthenware it feels like it,s been fired at a higher temperature and thrown quite thinly, perhaps to allow for the piercings. 

Anyone with ideas about the mark, please let me know.

The markers mark

James Radley Young was making vases like this one, unglazed and decorated in "Egyptian" patterns, during the first world war. This vase, has an impressed Carter and Co Poole signature on the base, so it dates from some time prior to 1921.  It also has a rather nicely impressed thumb mark, visible on the photo about half way up on the right.  Picking the vase up now, the indentation fits the side of my thumb quite snugly, as it would have done the potter as he or she first lifted it from the wheel.

546 and 205

Two HI pattern spill vases, the smaller one shape no. 205 is the more recent addition to my collection, and I think the better proportioned of the two for being smaller.

Back to Black

There's a skill in photographing black vases against a black back-drop that I do not possess, but given this blogs house style, I do try.  The small vase is the new one, to go alongside it big brother, both from the Bokhara range of jars designed by Robert Jefferson in 1964.