Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie

(Oxfordshire 1895-1985 Wiltshire)

Stoneware vase with vertical fluting, and pale blue celadon glaze, c. 1940s

signed with impressed monogram

16 x 10 cm.

Pleydell-Bouverie was a pioneer of studio pottery, and is known for her wood-ash glazes and unique take on the aesthetic of Bernard Leach, with whom she studied, after first attending evening classes in pottery at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Dora Billington.

She had the benefit of Virginai Woolf’s proverbial ‘Room of One’s Own’, being of private means, with an aristrocratic background, which meant she could pursue her own singular vision without the pressure of selling her pots to earn her living. She had a long relationship with fellow potter, Norah Braden. In 1925, Pleydell-Bouverie started her first pottery with a wood-fired kiln in the grounds of her family estate at Coleshill, later moving in 1946 to her second pottery in a malthouse attached to a 17th century manor house at Kilmington in Wiltshire, where she used her first oil-fired kiln, and then an electric one.