Pottery

Collector Bob Fredman relates a recent project – identifying, cleaning and restoring a nondescript terracotta garden urn,covered in house paint, with links to Brisbane and the early European settlers of the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

Acanthus leaves have been used as decoration in buildings, furniture and pottery since the birth of western architecture. They were often a decorative feature on Australia’s early Neo-Classical furniture until the advent of Australian themes towards the end of the 19th century. Bob Fredman discusses the use of acanthus motifs by Australian artisans and concludes with some information about an interesting piece of pottery.

European immigrant William Milner was a little-known entrepreneur who established a porcelain manufacturing business after arriving in Melbourne in 1911. The porcelain industry was largely driven by a massive need for electrical insulators, and, as COVID-19 has demonstrated today, a local industry was essential to guarantee supply. Milner expanded into table wares, decorative items and sculpture, establishing substantial ceramic workshops in Victoria and later Queensland, which continued to be managed by family members after his death in Ipswich in 1942. Some of Victoria’s best known art potters such as Merric Boyd, Hatton Beck and William Ricketts experimented with porcelain. This story is abridged from a chapter of Greg Hill’s new book presenting his detailed research into Australian porcelain and its makers.

Curator and historian Tim Roberts previews a new exhibition on the English ceramics firm Wedgwood, founded by Josiah Wedgwood in 1759, and linked with the British colonisation of Australia through its design and manufacture of the ‘Sydney Cove Medallions’ in 1789. These were made from Sydney clay sent back to Staffordshire, the first known attempt to exploit Australia’s economic resources by a colonial power.

In the aftermath of World War II, many commercial potteries were established in Australia to satisfy the market disrupted by hostilities, particularly for Japanese and European imports. While some of these new commercial potteries were established by immigrants from war-ravaged Europe, Henning Alfred Rathjen (1903–1968) was one of the Australian-born artists who established a new pottery studio to cater for local demand and post-war innovations in art pottery. Rathjen established his eponymous pottery studio in Melbourne in 1948, producing quality slip-cast wares over the next 20 years. His production moved away from standard 1940s designs, with applied flowers or incised designs and textured surfaces, as he gradually developed unusual shapes, different glazes and contrasting, flamboyantly coloured glazes. He sold his pottery studio in 1968, just before his unexpected death a few months later.

Glen went on to tell us, in a joking manner, that he had made these fake 1859 Secession Medals in 1977 for fun in the hope of making some money while he was a student working in the Visual Arts department at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education in Toowoomba (now the University of Southern Queensland). He had fired his medals in its pottery kilns.

Greg Hill’s new research, using contemporary newspapers and other resources now easily available on Trove, has found a raft of previously unknown potteries operating in Victoria in the 19th century. These push back the dates of Victorian pottery manufacture into the 1840s. Many examples of these wares however were overlooked and unrecognised, because the names of their potteries suggested a British origin. Until now, the earliest date for pottery manufacture in Victoria was thought to be in the 1860s, with a few potteries operating long and successfully into the 20th century. Most potteries were small operations run by people from diverse backgrounds, producing different types of ceramic goods, augmenting and often pre-dating the bigger, well-known potteries.

Melbourne’s International Exhibition of 1880 was a huge event in its day, allowing Victoria to parade the colony’s achievements to the world. The magnificent building designed by Joseph Reed has hosted many important events for Victoria and Australia. Today, with the gardens, it is UNESCO listed as one of the very few 19th-century palaces of industry still standing. Many souvenirs commemorated this event and recently I have been looking with fresh eyes at my black lacquerware Mauchline Ware dice cup (plate 1). This cup bears a sepia-tinted oval view labelled ‘EXHIBITION BUILDING MELBOURNE 1880’, within a decorative lily of the valley background. Museums Victoria has a money box turned in black lacquerware showing the same scene.

Exactly 250 years ago, HMB Endeavour commanded by Lt James Cook was the first British ship to sight the east coast of Australia, then known as the Great South Land or Terra Australis Incognita. As one of the most important exploration milestones in Australia’s history, it now seems to be passing largely unnoticed, a casualty of the present pandemic.

Una Deerbon was a well-known maker of hand-built pottery, often with applied moulded decoration. When in her late 40s, she began making pottery in 1930. Just three years later she held three solo commercial exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, launching her on a successful career as a potter which lasted until 1964. Now her grandsons have dutifully documented her life and her art in a new book.

Australiana is often defined by the combination of local materials, local motifs and local skills to create art that is distinctively and recognisably Australian. The Harvey School of pottery making, which flourished at the Central Technical College in Brisbane from 1916 for more than thirty years is one of the best-known examples. Almost 40 years ago, Glenn Cooke began researching the Brisbane woodcarver L J Harvey (1871–1949), who taught himself pottery making and established the school, which mainly attracted well-bred young ladies. New evidence emerged in 2019 to reveal developments in the early years.

Brothers Graham and William Ferry both trained as potters in Yorkshire, emigrated to Victoria and set up their own potteries in Melbourne’s Brunswick in the last two decades of the 19th century. Noted for their sculptural domestic wares and colourful majolica wares, here Greg Hill makes the case for recognising them as Australia’s first art potters.

With Heart & Hand: art pottery in Queensland 1900–1950. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, 2018. Standard edition $125, limited edition (with designer print)

In the 19th century, many artists trained in Europe came to Australia, where the strange new land often impacted on how they saw the world and what they depicted. French china painter Madame Bourdic did not succumb to the Australian environment. She continued to paint china in the academic tradition she had learned in France and Italy, and taught those delicate painting techniques to married and single women students in Melbourne.

The Australiana Society committee recently voted to make financial grants of up to $5,000 to museums to acquire Australian-related material that they could not otherwise obtain. The Sydney Jewish Museum situated in Darlinghurst, Sydney and celebrating its 25th year in 2018, was the successful applicant for the first grant to be presented, allowing it to acquire several items of Australian Jewish history.

Glenda King, Maude Poynter: painter and potter. Tasmanian Chapter of the Australiana Society Inc., Hobart, 2018. Soft cover, 108 pages, plentiful colour and black and white illustrations. ISBN 978-0-646-98281- 6,

Beleura, the house and garden on the Mornington Peninsula on the southern shore of Port Phillip Bay, is an estate left to the people of Victoria by John ‘Jack’ Morton Tallis (1911–1996), the youngest son of Sir George Tallis of J C Williamson theatres fame... Here was a mystery: how did John Tallis know Klytie Pate and why did he buy her studio pottery? It is a complicated tale and involves many players. The five found objects led to a much greater story that deserved to be told: how Klytie Pate and John Tallis, two very young, impressionable people, were brought together through an unlikely shipboard friendship and a clash with the worlds of Christian and Napier Waller, two sophisticated artists, storytellers and educators.

I started at the Queensland Art Gallery as the first Curator of Decorative Arts in 1981 ‘wet behind my (curatorial) ears’. The first project I initiated, LJ Harvey & his School, opened in September 1983, following the relocation of the Gallery’s collection to its new building on the south bank of the Brisbane River in 1982. This was the first fully researched and published exhibition project ever undertaken by the Gallery.

This soft-paste porcelain mug, 8.7 cm high and 9 cm diameter, is painted in overglaze enamels on a Wedgwood “Barlaston” blank dated 1947. Feint’s choice of this Wedgwood form, together with the incorporation of the date 1947 and the letters J F as key elements in the design, suggests an awareness of the notable commemorative and other mugs that English artist Eric Ravilious (1903–42) designed for Wedgwood in the late 1930s.1

The Art Gallery of South Australia is showcasing for the first time over 50 examples of Australian decorative arts given to the Gallery by Adelaide psychiatrist Dr Robert Lyons, who had assembled one of the finest private collections of South Australian decorative arts.

The Fereday service is a rare example of armorial porcelain tableware relating to colonial Australia, bearing the name, position and crest of the owner Dudley Fereday, first Sheriff of Van Diemen’s Land (1823–33) (plate 1). Although none of the surviving pieces bears a mark identifying the manufacturer, the ware has previously been attributed to Spode, despite not being known Spode shapes. A recent discovery in Tasmania has uncovered the English porcelain factory which made the Fereday table service.

Produced from its premises in Launceston, Tasmania, Campbell’s pottery products were shipped to shops and agents in Tasmania, mainland Australia, New Zealand and as far as India and the USA. Examples can be found regularly at antique shops and auction rooms throughout Australia. The vast majority of pieces available today to collectors were produced during the 1920s to 1940s when there was a significant output of hand-thrown domestic and decorative pottery.

Hordern House commissioned Elizabeth Ellis OAM, the Emeritus Mitchell Librarian, to research the background to the Chinese export porcelain punchbowl in the Mitchell Library showing scenes of the colony about 1814.