AB: Well, this is a piece that's saying it's a work of art, isn't it? Perhaps I know that, rather than seeing it. I know that's how he thought of his work, and I know that's how he charged for his work. I think in Oliver's book it says that this was sixty guineas when they bought it, which would be a lot in those days, wouldn't it? I don't feel very strongly for it, but I like that he opened up that avenue of saying, very definitely, that a pot could be a work of art. That is a very important stand to make, I think.

It's obviously a stoneware piece and already Leach was concentrating more on stoneware, as if it gives higher status to be [a] harder, high-fired object.  [video clip starts] It's a rather tentative drawing - if the camera can see it - with these nice glaze spots. That's what gives it its zest, I think, the colour, the sudden colour, because otherwise you would hardly know there was a figure on it, and you start to read it because you're attracted to those splodges of colour which have melted into the base glaze. Of his work it's not as strong as many pieces that I do relate to, which are perhaps the more vigorously striped or making a bigger impact somehow. But thinking of it in its time, it's striking, I think. [video clip ends] He and Leach, of course, were fighting for the same job of running the Ceramics Department of the Royal College and Staite-Murray won, otherwise I think the course of history would have been very ...

MP: Do you think the decoration of the figure and where it's placed in relation to the profile of the pot works?

AB: It's a little bit underdone, I think. I think he could have gone a bit further. It's tentative, as I was saying. Yes, if that was me relating to this object I wouldn't just do ... well, if I did it on just one side I would make it a bit more 'oomphy'. If I was doing it like that I think I would do something else on the back. Not to make it symmetrical and balance it, but just something that would draw you round outside the object, because it is a three-dimensional object, it's not a mantlepiece thing. So yes, perhaps it's a bit disappointing in that way.

MP: Because presumably the fact that the head is at the narrow part at the top and people talk about pots in relation to the foot and the body and ...

AB: Yes, it's fitting. it's fitting. I mean this little curve does suggest the head part. It would be interesting to know whether he meant to draw the figure on it when he made the pot or whether it was an afterthought or whether it was a kind of response. I would love to see more things made at the same time to see whether that was what he was doing again and again, or if it was a sudden whim. But it does talk very clearly about foot, shoulder, lip, doesn't it?

NB: [video clip starts] I suppose again for me a judge of anything is 'Does it stand the test of time?' I could go upstairs and I could point to things which are from the 18th century and medieval periods which have just got such a timelessness about them. And for me looking at this again it doesn't have that appeal whatsoever. It's just dead clay to me really. And I think even the graphic element I think is so ... you know, what is it? It doesn't have any graphic qualities at all. I think the glaze obliterates the drawing. There's no truth to material in any sense which these guys preached about. {video clip ends]

You know to see it against some works in the present day, I just ignore it. I just walk past it. I suppose there's this anthropomorphic shape, but again I can't see what the fuss was about really. And in terms of the graphic, if you're going to make a statement then make a statement. Why is it so inconspicuous? It's so disguised by the glaze and the mark making's so timid. Go and see some of those slipware dishes, see the vigour in some of those things. Or go and look at some of those oriental pieces again, which they were kind of inspired by. Go back to the source and you'll see that kind of evidence in those pieces, but not from what these people at the time were kind

MP: I suppose for somebody like Staite-Murray you've got to take it in the context of the time. It was 1930 and it was maybe made for a particular type of 1930s London interior.

NB: Yes, but I can only draw on what I see now and my own prejudices and standards of quality, as superficial as they may be. I can only go from a gut instinct, which is the way I assess things anyway, and it doesn't have any appeal whatsoever really. I'm sure they'd hate what I do, but again it's this value [that] people, especially museums, bestow on objects, because someone says 'Staite-Murray' [and] everyone then worships the ground that Staite-Murray walked on you . But I don't think it stands the test of time. Sorry.

EC: It's a very impressive piece of pottery. As I said I'm writing this biography of Bernard Leach, and there was always a very odd relationship between them in the 1920s and going on into the 1930s. Bernard Leach saw himself as a competitor and they both in fact wanted to become the Head of the Ceramics Department of the Royal College of Art, and in the end William Staite-Murray became Head and Bernard Leach didn't. And this led to terrible friction between them.

But nevertheless Leach was a great admirer of William Staite-Murray, and in lots of ways William Staite-Murray was in a better position to take over the job at the Royal College of Art because he had a very much more clearly worked out ideology, if you like, and that was that he only wanted to make pots which were works of art, so that they were all given titles. He wasn't interested in making functional pots at all. He didn't want to make cups and saucers. He didn't want to make both sorts of ware. He didn't see himself as anything like the artisan tradition, he saw himself as an artist. He was a member of various artistic groups in London, and this is where he showed his work. Indeed, he showed it in art galleries alongside work by people like Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood and various other artists at the time: quite major artists, not insignificant artists, quite major galleries. And he charged a lot for his pots, which was another great source of discontent for Bernard Leach because he was rather jealous that he wasn't getting the same price.

And so this pot in a way is a very typical William Staite-Murray pot from his rather late period. His earlier period sometimes gets a bit messy, sometimes gets bit too lewd, sometimes gets a bit out of control, but you feel that there's a very conscious way of throwing this pot which gives you something like a figure, so that it is actually resembling a figure. And, of course, the classic way of describing a pot is in terms of its shoulder, its belly and its foot and its neck and so on, in terms of the human body. [video clip starts] Here he's taken an ancient classical subject, Madonna and Child, which you can see incised into the clay under here. It's not particularly sophisticated drawing, although it is actually inscribed, I think, touching it, but here you can see them if you look carefully, and of course he's dressed the Madonna with these spots of copper which have come out red, and a little bit of blue at the top. So it's a semi-abstract piece which, when you look at it, you can just begin to see the qualities of it. You can either see it as a Madonna... he's directed our attention, you know. He says this is Madonna so we start to look at it as Madonna. If we haven't looked at the label we might very easily miss this decoration [video clip ends] and just look at it as an abstract pattern, a sort of rites of Spring pattern, dappled leaves, sunlight falling through, falling on to it.

And there's an odd relationship I think between the patterning, this falling pattern and the actual form of the piece itself. But it's an interesting relationship. It's not something which jars particularly, but it's not immediately obvious. You've got to start working out what it is that's going on, and what's going on in the actual piece itself. The colours go together. I mean, it's an odd thing to say but what we can say is that the colours are harmonious. They're not always harmonious, and interestingly it avoids the brown. It goes for this dark, purplish, pinky colour and the blue, and then the grey background is quite nice not to have the brown away from that. Because William Staite-Murray, like Bernard Leach, fired in a reduction kiln, [and] this is the result which he tended to get.

Like Bernard Leach, William Staite-Murray was greatly influenced by oriental art and he was very envious of Bernard Leach because he had studied in the Orient. He was the authentic potter in that sense and William Staite-Murray had only learnt it in this country. And so for a time they were friends in the early 1920s, and William Staite-Murray went down to Bernard Leach's pottery and then he learnt how to turn a foot ring, because he'd only ever seen oriental pots in museum collections and he'd never actually seen the foot ring. He'd never examined it, and Bernard Leach showed him how to do it.

William Staite-Murray met Shoji Hamada who was over at that point helping Bernard Leach at St Ives, and Hamada, of course, was the real authentic Japanese potter and they got on very well together. And William Staite-Murray endlessly picked Hamada's brains about thowing and he tried to throw on Hamada's Japanese kick wheel and found it very, very difficult, and he didn't give up even though his face it is said became as red as a turkey cock, which is quite a nice image because he was rather a pristine Scot, of Scottish descent. His father had been a dealer in, I think, tulip bulbs and various other things, and [Staite-Murray] was made to go to the family firm, but broke away and became an artist. But the whole thing for me forms a unity which I like very much. I'm not a great fan of William Staite-Murray, in fact I actually prefer Bernard Leach because in a way Leach has a humanitarian quality which I think Staite-Murray doesn't. I feel it's all a little bit too self-conscious. But he was trying to, and he did, actually forge a path for studio potters that said you can make art objects, and Bernard Leach I think hovered in a way that William Staite-Murray didn't and so in that sense he was a very important pioneer.

One of the things about Staite-Murray was that he had an enormous influence on one section of potters in the 1920s and the 1930s. As Head of the Royal College of Art he was in London, he was on site, he was showing in major galleries and he ran a ceramics course at the Royal College of Art. And although he had this odd reputation of teaching by silence - you know he would walk into the studio and look at them and then say nothing so that the students had to think, 'God, what? What? What? What?' - nevertheless he was very interested in oriental ideas. He was a Buddhist. He enthused this idea of the pot as a work of art and people like Henry Hammond and R D Washington and many other students went through.

The only problem was that they all made pots like William Staite-Murray, so that sometimes you can put them by the side of a William Staite-Murray and hardly tell them apart. People might say that about Bernard Leach, but I think because Staite-Murray's ideas were so much clearer it became very difficult for students to break away. And although they were well imbued with the idea that they could make works of art, in fact they got landed with it, they got saddled with it. R D Washington made pots like William Staite-Murray really for most of his life, and in the end broke away. Henry Hammond made pots. I mean he was a major influence, but in fact the influence when you look was wider than that. It wasn't just that he wanted them to make pots like him. It was in the way of thinking about pots, and this was very important.

CC: It's very curious. I'm really interested in this composition of the Madonna and Child and why it's actually on the pot, and what decisions he made to place this particular figure on a vessel form. [video clip starts] And I wonder, is he actually referencing any particular Madonna, whether it was a painting or a sculpture he saw, or is it purely imaginative? It looks like a Botticelli. But they're two very contradictory things, I think, with the Madonna drawing on something seemingly figurative, but phallic - it's like one big thing, isn't it? And very heavy. I almost prefer the back of it, so you're just getting the form with the travel of the glaze that actually accentuates the form. I think the decoration seems to just not make sense really. [video clip ends]

It might have made more sense just calling it 'Madonna without the drawing' but then again maybe that wasn't what he was thinking. These are quite, quite lovely, these lines that describe the form of the shoulder to the neck, and then completely opposite that dribble that actually cuts across that. It has a lot of this going on, and then this, that I quite like. And the spotting is very interesting, but the drawing doesn't seem to make much sense to me, why it's there. It seems a lot more laboured this drawing, much harder where the forms have travelled. There seems to be a lot more consideration from the foot up to the neck. And even the decoration seems a lot more liberal, a lot more interesting. She's very stiff. Am I allowed to look on the inside? It's got lovely spotting.

MP: It's interesting that if it didn't have the title, what it would be like? It was at a time when Staite-Murray was commanding very high prices for named pieces of work.

CC: So the title of the work gives it more value?

MP: I think I'm pushing it a bit there, but it's an interesting ...

CC: It's interesting about what this pot does, you know. Does it give it more value by putting something decorative on it, or an image on it, to give it more status, like Madonna tends to attract those higher values of icons, and Madonna is seemingly impressive and important. And that whether the vessel... does it elevate its importance by just putting this particular image on it as opposed to, maybe, a landscape or whatever. But it seems strange that it also just stands there.

TH: Again, it's amazing to be in actual direct contact with a pot. Again, you realise how useless photography is as a means of conveying a sense of... [video clip starts] I have seen a lot of the Staite-Murray pots at York City Art Gallery and been able to handle them, be close to them, but I think just my physical relationship with this pot demonstrates why Staite-Murray made such an impact on the art scene, much more of an impact I think it has to be said than Bernard Leach. These are comparatively massive, and all the debates in the 1920s and 1930s about pots as sculpture really seem to be embodied in Staite-Murray's work. It was something that critics liked to say, you know, Charles Marriott said, 'We may not have a Brancusi, but we have our British studio potters.' [video clip ends]

And that doesn't always make sense in the context of some of the more domestic looking objects, but this, I suppose, it was around about this time that Staite-Murray had made friends with Ben Nicholson and was moving into that. He had exhibited with Winifred and Ben Nicholson and he then went on to exhibit with the Seven and Five Society which by 1934 had declared itself abstract. You couldn't exhibit unless your work was abstract. This is a magnificent abstract shape, but if you look carefully you can see he's incised a rather Modigliani-like Madonna, and then this incredibly beautiful, casual series of little marks just plopping down give a sense of her robe, her dress, her cape or whatever. But it's really subtle and it doesn't interfere with this extraordinary shape.

Yes, [it's] after 1934, I think, because of this ruling dreamt up, I think by Ben Nicholson. Ben Nicholson could be very, very tough and authoritarian. I think after that Staite-Murray only puts abstract designs on his pots, doesn't fit in with the Seven and Five Society's requirements. But I've often thought that some of his figurative work, incised or painted on, has let the shape of the pot down, sometimes it was a little banal. And while there are, in the same way as his pupil Henry Hammond could paint wonderful things on pots, some wonderful fish, but the next day a rather banal duck would be painted onto a pot, but this... I don't know, you just feel he's breathing a certain air, that he was in contact with Vorticist groups when he started the ??? pottery. He'd probably seen Kandinsky painting. I think he'd probably seen a lot of European art, not just at various shows organised by Roger Fry, but the Allied Arts Association. Between 1910 and 1914 he could have seen an awful lot. And that stayed with him right into the 1930s.

MP: Can you turn it round slightly to the camera?

TH: Oh yes. It's a bit nerve-wracking.

MP: Do you think in this case the incised decoration and the painted decoration go with the shape of the pot? Do they work do you think?

TH: Yes, I think they work beautifully, actually, especially the way these marks delicately seem to be like falling drops of some kind. There's a lot of talk about the way he and Leach approached things differently, which I think might be a bit exaggerated. But certainly the fact that he always gave major pieces titles, I suppose suggests he saw these as works that should be seen in a context, a kind of odd amalgam of painting and sculpture.

MP: It's interesting that he exclusively chose to make vessels that ...

TH: Yes, I think at that date what else could he have made? Some sort of animals or abstract. I don't think the ceramic world was ready for abstract, I mean this is the nearest: these are vessels but they're so excessive and elongated and odd really. And the only other way to go would have been the kind of animal sculpture in ceramic area which I think would have... I think he's moving some sort of... abstraction and pure form are very much on his mind. And then again of course he did have this extraordinary respect for particularly Chinese ceramics, and he also had mystical ideas about the act of throwing, at least his writing suggests that. There are a lot of anecdotes of how he didn't actually teach much when he was at the Royal College of Art where he ran the ceramics department. And he taught by not teaching in a kind of Zen Buddhist way. But I think he would have felt that there was enough space in the, in the contemporary art world for these kind of thoughts.

MP: He did amazingly well to position himself in a way that allowed him to charge the prices he charged and to appear in the galleries that he appeared [in]? He was obviously very astute.

TH: I suppose so, or was he just very inspired? I don't think he went out of his way. I think we're looking at it from a rather 21st century perspective, he wasn't a spin doctor and didn't have a PR company. I think he had a vision and a kind of ability to... I mean, making a friendship with somebody like Ben Nicholson I don't think was anything other than shared interests, and I think on the other hand that the fact that Bernard Leach actually didn't seem to make friends with any leading sculptors or painters is rather revealing. He was perhaps a bit too locked up in his own memories of Japan, and perhaps too self-important to have that kind of interaction with another major artist. So I think the fact that he lived in London as opposed to Cornwall and he was teaching in a major art school was probably helpful, but I think his eminence came from passion and enthusiasm. And he fell victim to changing tastes. That's somehow the impression I get.

By the end of the 1930s the tides were turning against that kind of early modern idealistic work. It's all innocence and roughness and this sort of boldness, and if one was making pots there was a kind of implication that you should be designing for industry. That was the mood of the 1930s. So this is made on the cusp [of] changing critical reception and changing expectations of ceramics. And then, well, tragically after 1938 I don't think he ever made another pot. He found himself in Rhodesia in the war and only made a few fleeting visits back to Britain. I don't know when this pot was actually acquired?

MP: 1976.

TH: Right, so that was a retrospective purchase. That's interesting. Because there's another magnificent pot in the Museum collection called 'The Wheel of Life'. That was bought in 1958. There was a show of left over work which made quite a big impression in post-war Britain. No, I think this is an absolutely wonderful pot. And there's often a sense you've got of the Leach ??? Staite-Murray. This does make you feel there's a great ambitiousness and boldness about the man. And that not having visited the Far East was perhaps an advantage. You know, there were things he admired, but he was able to take the scale right up, by the standards of the time.

MP: There's just a feeling of Staite-Murray about it and a personal feeling about it, whereas with the Leach you're always thinking of where it came from and what it was derived from, [but] with Staite-Murray they tend to be individual and...

TH: Yes, no it's easier, on the surface anyway, to sort out all the sources that Bernard Leach was drawing on. In a way figures like Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie and Nora Bradon had more in common with this kind of work, and interestingly their work was compared to music. Critics were a bit bemused about how they could write about this sort of stuff, and so the music analogy is some other form of abstraction which applied to their work. In a way I hadn't thought of that before, they've got slightly more in common aesthetically because of the boldness and the simplicity.

OW: Well, this is an entirely different category from the Bernard Leach cup and saucer. [video clip starts] The thing which really interests me about Staite-Murray, the question one has to ask, is what would have happened to him or his reputation if Leach hadn't gone on to become really famous and dominant in the 1950s. Because the interesting thing - and it's sometimes difficult to grasp now - is that in the 1920s and 1930s he was by far the more famous, the more high profile, the more successful potter, much more than Leach. There's the famous thing in the 1925 Paris Exhibition where the British reporters come back mentioning Staite-Murray and Gwendoline Parnell, [they] singled them out particularly and Leach was just listed with a number of other names as other potters who also showed good work. [video clip ends]

And then Staite-Murray got the Professorship of the Royal College. And he used to be much more successful in the sales rooms. His shows often had many more pots than Leach's and although it's not true that everything that he sold cost a hundred guineas and everything Leach sold was very cheap, he certainly sold at higher prices than Leach. This piece, for instance, I think in the sale was listed at sixty guineas which was an astonishingly high price then. I think Leach in 1930 was hoping for a weekly salary himself of five pounds to support him and his family and children, and that is considerably more I think in those days than the ... what was it we paid? £360 in the 1970s for it.

If one's going to compare him to Leach, [it] inevitably shows in a sense what a professional Staite-Murray was. I don't think Leach could have thrown a pot of this size. Technically this is a very sure bit of throwing; you might not like the shape but that's how he meant it to be, this shape, that's what he wanted. It's a very sure piece of throwing, it's technically very well made, good quality stoneware, well-fired, everything under control. And if you contrast that with Leach, [he's] still struggling with his great big kiln [and] getting very, very varied results out.

There are interesting parallels. They're both similarly interested in Eastern mysticism, in Chinese wares of the classic period. It's looking back, I suppose, vaguely to Sung pieces, but them taking a very different take on it, [with] Leach in a sense producing reproductions almost of early pieces, [against] Staite-Murray taking it as a basis for his own development, and the shape echoes something vaguely Chinese but it's certainly not a copy. And things in this very dramatically emphasised foot, some might even say ungainly. This is not a shape that would have fitted Leach's definition of vital form and so forth. And then the drawing on it [is] in entirely unoriental mode, and he's linking in much more with other contemporary British, English art at that time, I think. But still with the same hooks back into the pieces from the past that Leach had. Staite-Murray was very friendly with Uma Thopolos, the great collector of Chinese things, and went to visit his collection and saw real things which he was able to handle. I think in a funny way much more than Leach did - sitting down in St Ives [he] was so deprived of so many resources. It's funny, it's rather unfashionable wear and Staite-Murray's always struggled, I think, to find the appreciation. And I find this a bit difficult to take in. I find it very much of its period. It's not something that.. But no, I admire him as a potter and I like that as a pot.

MP: What do you think of the decoration?

OW: Not my taste really. As a curator, though, you have a whole series of layers on which you appreciate things. I admire and appreciate this because it is by a man who was important, we know where it fits in, that it was in that sale, that it was given a name, that it's a documentary piece. It's a very fine bit of potting as well. As I said, it has its importance there and that's still something that resonates. There's a very different layer of me that says, 'Would I actually prefer this or something else on my mantlepiece at home?' And there are other pieces by him that I prefer to this. It's a bit figurative, but there are other pieces of his that I find so extraordinary still.