We are nearing the end of the exhibition ‘The Leach Pottery: 100 years on from St Ives’ (it closes on 25th September 2021). It has been a principal contribution by the Crafts Study Centre to the events planned for the centenary and led by our colleagues at the Leach Pottery, although impacted, of course, by the pandemic.

Central to the exhibition was the display of works from the Alan Bell archive – many never seen before in public – including paintings, unpublished drawings and etchings, and other memorabilia given by Bernard Leach to his friend and amanuensis.

As we near this moment of closure, a new acquisition has entered the collections, and this asks, rather than answers, questions.

It is a small card album, put together with some care, the punched holes enabling a cotton cord to hold the book more or less firmly together. It is titled by hand, in a careful and now sepia ink, ‘Leach Pottery Photographs  St Ives. C.’ Inside the little volume are nineteen mounted photographs of pots and two exhibition photographs.

The ceramics are mostly works by Bernard Leach, but there is also a jug by Michael Cardew and other pieces perhaps by Shoji Hamada. Some works seem to have an East Asian provenance, and they may possibly have been held in Leach’s personal ceramics collection, kept as ‘exemplars’. The book dates, most probably, from the mid to late 1920’s. A few unmounted photographs in the back of the book are also of interest because they are marked on the reverse. One well-known work by Bernard Leach with an octopus design says ‘£10. Galena slipware dish’.

The writing on the front cover is not in Leach’s hand, but the photographs are clearly from the pottery in St Ives. So what role might this book have played?

It could, I suppose, have been some kind of calling card, a personal hand-made gift for a potential collector in Japan or England (but surely Leach would have signed it?)

Perhaps it was used in the Leach Pottery itself, to show the range and creative interests of the Leach Pottery as a spur to Cornish purchasers.

Or could it have been made up by a later collector to give some contextual evidence to their interests or private collection of Leach’s work?

Or, maybe more likely, it was a display item from the Easter exhibition of rural crafts and industries held in the spring of 1926 at Gordon Russell’s furniture workshops in the Cotswolds, attended by both Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew.

It is, in any case, an original addition to the Crafts Study Centre’s extensive Bernard Leach archive, and future research will hopefully resolve its purpose and function. 

The book was donated to the collection by Ben Williams and Simon Olding, with their grateful thanks to Helen Brown who notified the CSC of the book, resting patiently in a second-hand book shop in Chipping Camden.

Images © Courtesy of the Bernard Leach Estate