LIVE24SEVEN // Property & Interiors


Instant Expert – MARTIN BROTHERS POTTERY


“When you enter the shop… you find yourself in a dim-lit passage with crowded shelves of stoneware jugs carved into leering, laughing, grinning and ogling heads, jostling with the most impossible, and most fascinating, pot birds with strangely anthropological expressions…”


Martin Brothers pottery forms a unique collecting niche and has become one of the most recognisable and interesting areas of the antiques market.


Production began in 1873 with a kiln at the family home in Fulham and expanded in 1877 with a move to a disused soap works on the canal on Havelock Road in Southall, where sporadic production would continue until 1923. Eldest brother Robert Wallace modelled the figures, Walter fired the kiln, mixed the glazes and threw the pots, Edwin was chiefly the decorator, while youngest brother Charles ran the city shop – badly. Wildly eccentric, even by the standards of his siblings, Charles hated to part with any of the wares and regularly hid the best of them under the floorboards and turned away many a prospective customer. Eventually, the shop burned down, the brothers lost their stock and Charles his sanity.


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All the brothers contributed, but it was Robert Wallace who led the creative enterprise and brought to it skills acquired as a student of sculpture at the Lambeth School of Art, as a freelance artist at the Doulton Pottery and as a stone carver who had worked on the Houses of Parliament. It was the latter experience that was to prove particularly influential. Rebuilt after a catastrophic fire in the mid-19th century by Charles Barry and William Pugin, the new Parliament buildings were suffused with neo-gothic architectural forms that included exotic and fanciful animal and human imagery ultimately derived from both the grottos of Roman antiquity and medieval heraldry.


FOR ME THE ATTRACTION


LIES IN THE FACT THAT EACH ONE IS TOTALLY UNIQUE,


HAVING BEEN HAND-CRAFTED BY ONE OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE BRITISH ART POTTERY MOVEMENT.


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Fashioned in stoneware, the creations of the studio comprised vases, jars, water jugs, bowls and small sculptures, all decorated with salt glazes cleverly combined to create realistic surface effects. It was Robert Wallace’s reinterpretation of mythical creatures, notably goblin faces, dragons, toads, fish, hedgehogs, salamanders, gargoyles, but above all birds such as parrots and owls that proved the most artistically and commercially desirable.


There was, however, a less-than-commercial approach to production. A single high-temperature kiln was fired just once a year without protective saggars, which meant that every pot was in direct contact with the flames. The result was a very unpredictable output; on one occasion, only one good pot emerged from an entire year's work, but the pieces that did emerge were Victorian art pottery at its best!


Perhaps the appeal lay in the Victorian’s curiosity in the macabre, maybe it reflected the social transitions of the day – or perhaps it was just keeping up with the Joneses. Then, as now, the appeal of the Martin Brothers comes in part from their incredible story.


In recent years the market for Martin Brothers pottery has increased exponentially. Interest was kindled back in the 1970s with Richard Dennis’ selling exhibitions, where he put together superb collections of the brothers’ work. In those days, it was relatively easy to source work, as the fashion was to discard fashions of the preceding decades in favour of the modern home.


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