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Anemone Plate

Moorcroft Pottery is made in Stoke-On-Trent, Staffordshire, England in the original factory that it has been in for over 100 years. The factory was started by William Moorcroft (1872-1945) whose name first appeared in the pottery market in 1897. William Moorcroft started out producing potteryt of his own style and techniques for James Macintyre & Co. where his name gained international recognition. But when Macintyre wanted to stop production of ornamental pottery within his company, Moorcroft sought out and recieved financial backing to start his own company. William Moorcroft’s pottery first came to the United States in 1904 and has been collected here ever since.  In 1929 Queen Mary, who had been collecting his pottery, made him “Potter to the Queen” and the pottery was so stamped up until 1949.

Today, the artists who carry on the Moorcroft tradition us the same techniques that originally defined Moorcroft. Different shapes of pottery are created by hand and then a mould is made of the original so that copies can be made. Once a pot is removed from the mould the piece is hand-turned on a potters lathe to ensure a perfectly smooth and even surface. Directly onto the shapes of the unfired pottery the artist lays out his design in full round (ie. the designs  are created specifically for the unique shape of the piece). The designs are then  traced from the master sheet onto the pot.  Just as William  did back then, todays artists use a small squeeze bottlew and trace over their pattern lines with liquid clay in a process called tube-lining. These raised lines give the piece a lovely surface texture. olored glazws are hand-painted onto the piece which is then fired. After the initial  firing the piece is dipped into a special clear glaze which, after a second firing, brings out the richness of the colors and gives the whole piece an amazing glass-like sheen.

Each piece has different stamps and markings on the bottom which tell who the designer was, the year of the design, the year the piece was made, who the tube-liner was, who paintedit and also the Moorcroft stamp and if  it is a limited edition.

Tags: Moorcroft Pottery

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Trivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.