By Professor Simon Olding

William Staite Murray

The Crafts Study Centre collects work primarily to help us understand the practice of the individual maker through the individual work. That being said, a richer contextual evidence-base for the object in question often adds importantly to our knowledge of the work, its position in the maker’s own development or their aspirations. 

This is especially true of a new pot which has entered the ceramic collections. It is a modestly sized stoneware bowl by William Staite Murray. The shape is straightforward enough; but the abstract brush marks, iron-rust to deep brown-black, the drops, blobs and swoopy-stripes, give the bowl a crackle of energy, a sense of motion and speed.

Related works by Staite Murray from the early 1920s take a more precise approach, so that the markings seem like some ancient calligraphic script, or ‘confident, individualistic quasi-ideograms’ as Malcolm Haslam observes in his monograph on Staite Murray. It was selected in the exhibition of Daryl Fromm’s fine personal collection ‘Gorgeously Grotesque’ held at the Worthing Museum and Art Gallery in 2003, and David Whiting reported that ‘here was Murray at his best, bowls – including rare hand built ones – and jars with strong calligraphic brush work and lush glazes’. It is a bowl with a good back story.

The bowl was donated to the Crafts Study Centre from this same collection, generously mediated by his partner, Carol. Fromm’s collection was catholic in taste, and he built up a notable body of work by Staite Murray, adding as was his custom, related archival materials that relayed his scholarly approach and his desire to add to the body of knowledge in ceramic history.

The gift of the bowl was joined by rare exhibition catalogues from the 1930s, and a 1928 exhibition catalogue of work by Staite Murray, shown alongside paintings by Ben and Winifred Nicholson. This indicates his belief in ceramic art as akin to, and as relevant as, fine art and sculpture, for as Staite Murray said ‘painters and sculptors may see in pottery another expression of their own craft, for it is a link between painting and sculpture’. 

William Staite Murray, bowl, hand-built, stoneware, iron and wood ash glazes, circa 1927, pentagon seal mark. Crafts Study Centre, 2020.54. Given by Daryl Fromm.