Anything but Staffordshire

Rosemary Hill

  • Rare Spirit: A Life of William De Morgan 1839-1917 by Mark Hamilton
    Constable, 236 pp, £22.50, September 1997, ISBN 0 09 474670 2

William De Morgan’s Life, death and reputation form a curious episode in the history of taste. He died, in 1917, a famous Edwardian novelist, and was almost forgotten. Nearly half a century later he was rediscovered as a great Victorian ceramist. Appropriately, the technique in which he excelled as a potter, lustre, is one that has itself been several times lost, rediscovered and discarded again by different civilisations. It requires a mixture of artistry and chemistry for which De Morgan was ideally suited.

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