Moorcroft Pottery

Sad news last week as ceramics firm W Moorcroft Ltd announced that it had ceased trading as of April 30. It appointed Moore Recovery to assist with placing the company into voluntary liquidation.

A round-up of art and antiques news from the previous seven days, including Sworders offering a major collection of Moorcroft pottery.

Two books concerning the world of antiques have recently been released with the support of UK dealers.

Fifty years after buying it the first time, former dealer Ray Heath has been reunited with a beloved Moorcroft vase.

The series of relatively austere wares made by Moorcroft in the 1930s are, today at least, not the factory’s most commercial designs.

After the James Macintyre & Co factory was awarded a gold medal at the St Louis International Exhibition in 1904, Moorcroft pottery was sold in the US by a number of boutique retailers including Shreve & Co of San Francisco and Tiffany in New York.

Topping a 360-lot, £242,000 single-owner collection of Martinware and Moorcroft at Kingham & Orme (23% buyer’s premium) was a Robert Wallace Martin grotesque bird.

Two pieces of Moorcroft Pomegranate pattern made exceptional sums within a matter of 24 hours at the end of September. Both were early versions of the popular pattern and dated 1912 – the year William Moorcroft left his studio at James Macintyre to run his own factory in Cobridge.

The recent sale of a single-owner collection of Moorcroft pottery by Kingham & Orme in Evesham demonstrated two distinct faces of the Staffordshire factory.

No good library of British art pottery literature is complete without a copy of Paul Atterbury’s 'Moorcroft'. The jacket illustration alone with its myriad tube-lined miniatures in a bewildering range of forms and patterns is particularly memorable. More than one collector has attempted to emulate the beguiling display.

The recent art and design sale at Cheffins in Cambridge included these two 1930s Moorcroft tubelined vases decorated with fish – a pattern from the later years of the William Moorcroft era.