Posts from the ‘United Kingdom’ Category

Jul 13

Colin Melbourne

Colin Melbourne (1928-2009) ranks highly along with the best of British Ceramic Designers of the 20th Century. It seems surprising that his work is not more widely known and appreciated outside the U.K, but many of his designs seemed to be ahead of their time.

The vase below I came across late last year is from Melbourne’s “Petra” – a series of several different camouflage style patterns for Royal Norfolk, Staffordshire, c late 1950s.

Colin Melbourne “Petra” Series Vase

Colin also produced a now very collectable series of animals for Beswick, another for Midwinter and one for Bossons. Colin also worked with David Queensberry on a series called “Drumlanrig Melbourne” with striking abstract patterns. You can see examples of most of these series on the UK website RetroSelect .

I think though, one of Melbourne’s most striking series was “Memphis”, for Crown Devon c1960. Read more

Jul 9

Bing & Grondahl “Tivoli”

This very smart design from Bing & Grondahl is called “Tivoli”, and was designed by Martin Hunt c1970s.

Martin Hunt, Co-Designer of the award winning Hornsea Lancaster Vitramic and a huge number of other Hornsea designs – also designed several dinnerware series for Bing and Grondahl and Rosenthal. The Bing & Grondahl designs include Tivoli, Korinth and Cumulus (decoration by Carl Harry-Stalhane) .

The same forms Martin Hunt designed for Tivoli were also used on the series Delphi, Olympia, Sahara, Troja, Corinth, Marrakech and Casablanca. All of these designs are now quite hard to get hold of.

If you want to see more Martin Hunt designs go to the V&A collections online here for Martin. They have a very large collection of his designs from the 1970s until current day, including some of the B&G designs mentioned above.

Jun 11

Royal Doulton “Iris”

Royal Doulton “Iris” V1346

Sometimes there are designs which you come across which are simply blindingly beautiful, and this happened when I saw this design as a set for the first time.

I don’t collect or buy a lot of Royal Doulton, but I do really like some of their series from the first half of the 20th Century, in particular from the Art Deco Era.

This is the era in which Doulton created some outstanding designs which were popular for decades to follow.

The pattern is “Iris” V1346, which was manufactured between 1937 and 1940 – officially not in the Art Deco Era – but such an archetypal art deco design with its design of an Iris. The angles and forms are also an identifier of the Art Deco era.

The shapes I think are actually very similar to Royal Copenhagen of the same period – like Fensmark and Quaking Grass.

The hand painting on this set is exquisite, as is the use of colour and line. Each piece is like a work of art and it’s fascinating to see how it all fits together – e.g. when the cup is on the plate how the shapes and design relate to each other so well.