Alan Caiger-Smith, Aldermarston Pottery, studio lustre ware charger, 1995
Size: Diameter 35.5 cm. Condition: Very good condition. There are some typical craze lines. A very faint hairline crack on the rim has been consolidated with glue – it is so faint it will not show on an image. The charger has a wire round the purpose made groove in the foot-rim, to enable it to be wall-hung. This charger is made using the Aldermarston technique of tin glazed lustre ware, and has a design with a lizard as the central motif. It is signed by Alan Caiger-Smith, the founder of Aldermarston pottery, and has a couple of other signatures as well as the date mark for 1995 and the number 70.1 – an unusually large number of marks for an Aldermarston piece. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He trained in pottery at the Central School of Art & Design in 1954 under Dora Billington. In 1995 Caiger-Smith founded the Aldermarston pottery, where he worked with a number of assistant potters, many of whom went on to be well known in their own right. The output of the pottery was almost exclusively tin-glazed earthenware, much of it using reduction fired lustre in the manner of the ancient Islamic potters. Caiger-Smith developed and refined this technique, although he also acknowledged the pioneering work of potters such as William de Morgan and Pilkington’s Royal Lancastrian in this field. Caiger-Smith ceased using assistants around the time this charger was made, but continued to pot at Aldermarston until it closed in 2006.
David White, British studio pottery porcelain bowl, c2000 Peter Sparrey studio pottery stoneware sang-be boeuf glazed jar and cover, c1990
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