Fitzwilliam Museum Private View for Ceramics Network...

Vicky Avery, Keeper of Applied Arts at The Fitzwilliam Museum, has kindly offered to host a private view for the Ceramics Network and the Northern Ceramic Society (NCS) of their exhibition China’s White Gold: Contemporary porcelain from Jingdezhen. 

The event will take place on:

Monday, 25 March 2013 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2.30- 4pm.

Booking is essential and numbers are limited.

The event will be a good opportunity for curators of ceramics collections and NCS members to meet.

The museum is closed to the public on Mondays and The Fitzwilliam Museum staff have generously offered to host this private view for Ceramics Network members and the NCS.

We will meet at the front of the Museum (by the gate for the modern Courtyard entrance) and be escorted in for signing in by Security. For this reason, booking is essential and numbers are limited.

Please contact Claire Blakey or Miranda Goodby for bookings: ceramics.network@stoke.gov.uk

Decorative Arts Society - call for papers

JOURNAL NO. 37 SUBMISSIONS INVITATION

Rebecca Wallis from the V & A has sent on the details of this call for papers from The Decorative Arts Society:

papers are now invited for the DAS 37th Journal, which will be a regular issue without a special theme. Articles should cover some aspect of the decorative arts from 1850 to the present day. They should present new or recent unpublished research and reflect fresh discoveries, additions to existing knowledge or reappraisals of previous studies.

DAS Journal articles are generally in the range of 3000 to 7000 words (excluding notes) accompanied by illustrations in colour and black and white.

Full guidelines on content, length and style will be sent to selected contributors. In common with most non-profit-making academic publications, we do not offer a fee although production expenses up to an agreed maximum will be given.

Short synopses to be sent to the editor by 1 February 2013
Selected contributors will be notified by 1 March 2013
Final copy with images must arrive with the editor by 1 June 2013
Journal 37 will be published in late 2013

Please send synopses to Judy Spours via email judyspours@hotmail.com

The Decorative Arts Society, PO Box 136, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 1TG

Help! Do you know who the artist is?

Ceramics Network wonders if anyone can help us with an artist identification?

This is a fine mosaic on the former Co-Op HQ in Ipswich.

If the artist can be identified this is another step towards English Heritage putting it forward for listing.

If you know please use that Contact Us page at the top of the blog. Or pass onto someone who may be able to advise.

Thanks!

New Delftware publication from the Fitzwilliam Museum

Delftware in the Collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum

by Michael Archer

This complete catalogue of the English and Irish delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, reveals much that is beautiful and unusual. The greater part of the collection was bequeathed by Dr J.W.L. Glaisher in 1928, and much of it is little known. A detailed publication has long been overdue, and this book illustrates 588 items in colour, many with multiple views. The strength of Dr Glaisher’s collection is the English earthenware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly delftware: no better assemblage has ever been made by a single collector. He amassed objects with great academic rigour over a period of more than thirty years, concentrating particularly on dated pieces while always exercising a discriminating and aesthetical eye.

Michael Archer’s catalogue provides details of date and place of manufacture, size, body, glaze, decoration and provenance with a full discussion where appropriate. Julia Poole has contributed a fascinating chapter with much new material on Dr Glaisher’s life and the extraordinary breadth of his collecting interests. There is also a general introduction to delftware, including a description of the manufacturing process; further sections give indexes and exhaustive information on all the works.

This book is an essential addition to the library of all scholars, collectors, auction rooms and dealers in the field and invaluable to those members of the public with an interest in the history of English pottery generally and delftware in particular.

Preview page from 'Delftware in the Collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum'

Michael Archer OBE, MA, FSA is a former Keeper of the Ceramics Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum where he became the acknowledged expert on English delftware. He has written numerous articles and books on ceramics, culminating in Delftware, the Tin-Glazed Earthenware of the British Isles, a catalogue of the collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum, published in 1997.

Murals in Britain 1920-1970

Murals in Britain 1920-1970: Revisions, revelations and risks

One-day conference at Morley College,

60 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7HT

Friday 8 March 2013

Summer  by Fred Millett, 1953
at St Crispin's School, Wokingham
recovered from under overpainting, 2011

You can also find a piece about this in The Public Catalogue Foundation's January 2013 newsletter in the article Who Cares About Murals? We Do! by Dr Alan Powers

Spode Training Day: Full Details, Programme & Booking Form Here

Ceramics Network Spode Training Day

Monday 25th February 2013

To apply for this FREE event 

at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery & 

Stoke-on-Trent City Archives

Covered sugar box, New Oval shape, circa 1804
Potteries Museum & Art Gallery

10.00-10.30:     Registration & coffee (Potteries Museum)

10.45-12.15:     Session 1: The Spode Archive (includes questions) (Archives)

12.45-1.45:       Lunch: Potteries Museum

2.00-3.30:         Session 2: Spode Pots (includes questions) Potteries Museum Ceramics Store

3.30-4.00:         Tea, feedback, id session

4.00-5.00:         Free time in museum galleries

Spaces will be limited to 12 so apply as soon as possible to ensure your place.

This is a unique opportunity to see both the archive and the ceramics produced by the Spode factory. The session at the Stoke-on-Trent City Archives is an introduction to a huge collection, dating from c1760 to 2008, which helps to tell the story of a famous business.

In the afternoon, there will be a guided handling session at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, to look at the products of the factory, and link them back to the material in the Spode archive.

Worldwide, Spode supplied kings and princes as well as kitchens and pantries, tableware and toilet ware, ceramics for steamships, railways and airlines and ornamental wares from miniatures to monumental pieces. Although this session focuses on the Spode factory, the techniques and issues discussed are applicable across British ceramics in general and the session will be delivered with both the relative ceramics beginner and the more experienced ceramics curator in mind.

Pam Woolliscroft with a Spode pattern book

The sessions will be led by Pam Woolliscroft, who works freelance in the museum and arts world as museum consultant, art cataloguer, lecturer and Spode specialist. After many years working in North Staffordshire museums she now works for a number of different organisations. She writes a regular blog about Spode history and speaks on various aspects of the Spode company history. Curator of the Spode Museum Trust in Stoke-on-Trent until 2008 she has also worked at Gladstone Pottery Museum, Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum, and Ford Green Hall where she was resident curator.

Directions:

The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Bethesda Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 3DW

More images here