William Moorcroft, Potter

This comprehensive, scholarly and multi-disciplinary life of the great Stoke-on-Trent potter William Moorcroft offers us a new account of design, ceramic production, and international aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century. By approaching Moorcroft as an inheritor of the William Morris tradition, Mallinson’s work successfully explores the tension between art pottery and industrial design – and Moorcroft’s pioneering role within both traditions between the wars. From Buckingham Palace to Liberty’s, from the Royal Academy to the New York World’s Fair, Moorcroft was a global figure of design excellence, whose place within modernism, ceramic art and the history of the Potteries has now been so compellingly told.’

Jonathan Mallinson, a collector and Emeritus Fellow at Trinity College Oxford, has released William Moorcroft, Potter: Individuality by Design as a free publication via Open Book Publishers. It was developed with several dealers including AD Antiques, Andrew Muir, Rumours Decorative Arts and Wayne Hopton. Mallinson says: “This book was inspired by a small wartime pomegranate vase seen at an antiques centre. It sparked an interest in William Moorcroft’s pottery which was greatly developed by conversations with some of the leading decorative arts dealers of the last two decades.” He undertook further research in the National Art Library and in the Stoke-on-Trent City Archives where Moorcroft’s archive is held. The dealers consulted also contributed many of the illustrations. Mallinson adds: “Such is the incomparable benefit of fairs, and the personal interaction they make possible; the exchange of knowledge is as valuable as the trade in pots.”