Porcelain Centre Piece
Three plump putti supporting a bowl draped with hydrangeas make this a truly remarkable porcelain centrepiece. Attribution and dating of antique porcelain is a tricky business, but two rules of thumb can help a great deal – if a piece says ‘England’ on the bottom then it was made between 1891 but before 1902 when ‘Made in England’ came into use. Companies were able to use the ‘Limited’ suffix from 1861 although they may not have adopted it immediately. When watching TV Antique programmes where a rough date of manufacture is given they will often say circa 1880; this is because many factories only began to use ‘Limited’ from this date and if the piece has a Trademark then it was made after 1875.
This porcelain centre piece has a registration mark – a diamond shape with a series of numbers and letters within and around it. These were used between 1842 and 1883 denoting that the design was registered at the London Patent Office and therefore protected, although this does not mean that you can be sure the piece is English as European manufacturers also used this system. Two types of mark were used; between 1842 to 1867 a letter denoting the year of manufacture was featured in the top section of the diamond but this moved to the right-hand section for marks made from 1868 to 1883. After this date the diamond shape was discontinued and a consecutive numbering system was introduced with the prefix ‘Rd No.’
Initial exploration of the mark on the bowl shows a diamond shape so we can be sure it was registered before 1883 and as the year letter is on the right-hand side this happened after 1868. The beauty of the diamond mark over the consecutive numbering system is that the arrangement of the letters and numbers allows us to pinpoint the exact day on which the pattern was registered. The date letter on this bowl is ‘Y’ denoting 1879 and the letter ‘B’ at the bottom of the diamond gives us the month of October. The final clue is the number in the top section which is the exact date of the month and we are able to confirm that this pattern was first registered on 16 October 1879.
Design Brief
Ceramics by Clarice Cliff
A Potted Clarice Cliff
Born at Tunstall, Staffordshire in 1899 to an ironworker father, Clarice Cliff had seven siblings. Leaving school at just 13 she was apprenticed as an enameller to Lingard Webster & Co. where she learned how to paint free-hand designs onto pottery. A move to Hollinshead & Kirkham taught her lithography, the practice of applying transfer prints to pottery before firing, which in turn led to her employment at A. J. Wilkinson Ltd., the company she would work at for the rest of her career.
Her extraordinary skills were soon recognised by Colley Shorter, the managing director, and he offered her the opportunity to develop new designs at the Newport Pottery which had been acquired by Wilkinson’s. In 1927, following a brief period studying sculpture at the Royal College of Art, she returned to Staffordshire and began developing her groundbreaking range of Bizarre ware.
At its peak between 1929 and 1935, the brand kept around 150, mainly female, decorators in gainful employment. It was sold by such illustrious retailers as Waring & Gillow and Harrods, the latter for a brief period selling limited edition sets featuring original designs by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Frank Brangwyn, Graham Sutherland and others, but sadly they didn’t sell well.
In 1940 after a decade as Company Art Director, Clarice married Colley Shorter, just as the fortunes of her extraordinary design venture finally waned. The Newport Factory was requisitioned by the Ministry of Supply during the war and, at its end, only a few of the most popular designs resumed production.
Clarice retired in 1965, two years after Colley’s death and the sale of the company to Midwinter. A mania for Art Deco design which developed from the 1960s saw her popularity grow again and in 1972, the year of her death, a retrospective of her work was staged at Brighton Museum.
I have a few pieces she designed in my Etsy shop including this pretty pastel floral jug which is from the ‘Ceramics by Clarice Cliff’ range. You can find out more about it here.