Lowestoft soft-paste porcelain: 1756-1801.

Map of Lowestoft in Suffolk,

facing Amsterdam across the North Sea.

A few years ago I asked my students to select an article on Lowestoft porcelain and they thought Antiques Trade Gazette to be particularly helpful.

Clay was found on the Gunton Hall Estate near Lowestoft in Suffolk in 1756, leading to a partnership of local men that established the first Lowestoft porcelain company, then known as Walker & Co. Records show that their distinctive blue and white hand-painted porcelain was highly successful, even though the East Anglian fishing port (see map) was far away from the oth­er centres of C18th porcelain production like London, Staf­f­ordshire or Liverpool.

The ceramic body was made from soft paste, using local clay and bone ash. Clearly the founders aimed to produce useful rather than purely orn­amental wares for local consumption: tea bowls and saucers, small cream boats, mugs, jugs, tea pots and pickle leaves. At first the de­coration was only in under glaze blue; it consisted, like other early English factories, of Chinese-inspired painted landscapes or simple floral motifs. Lowestoft soon added inscribed legends in blue then, from the 1770s, in poly­chrome enamels.

Lowestoft flask, c1780
14cm tall high
from the Geoffrey Godden collection,
sold for £24,000 at Bonhams

By the 1780s one of the factory's specialities was producing special commissions made to com­memorate a special birth or marriage; the pieces were inscribed with the recipient's name and event date. And occasionally there would be a view of a local land­mark. This meant that while Lowestoft porcelain was often unmarked, an unusually high proportion of the pieces were documentary. The Lowestoft busin­ess plan worked; the factory turned out tableware and a handful of small animals for 40+ years! It closed in 1801.

Despite that long production run, Lowestoft was a small business compared to Worcester, but enough of their porcelain has survived to make it worth collecting. Amongst the best known of the collections are the Russell Colman Collection of the local mustard-making family sold in 1948; the Peter Scully Collection, sold in 2008 at Lowestoft auctioneers Russell Sprake, and the Paul Collection formed between the 1930s and 1950s by a local family which sold at Bonhams in 2010.

At auction the top-priced Lowestoft pieces have been inscribed pieces: birth tablets, named and dated mugs, or the blue and white and polychrome painted mugs and inkwells famously inscribed A Trifle from Lowestoft. If the piece was painted with a rare local view, especially by the painter Thomas Allen, it sold particularly well. In 2010, £24,000/USA$38,000 was paid at Bonhams for a very rare flask from the Godden collection that displayed a local shipbuilding scene (see photo above).

Even more expensive was the £30,000/USA47,000 paid at Russell Sprake in 2011 for a guglet/carafe and basin painted in blue with various scenes around the town and coast (see photo below). The charming simplicity and functionality of this set was later added to by artist Robert Allen. His images of St Margaret's Church, the harbour and the town's roads gave great local appeal.

Lowestoft guglet and basin 1764-5,
23cm high
sold for £30,000 at Russell Sprak
This was a world record price for a piece of Lowestoft porcelain at the time.

Readers can examine a special birth tablet that Bonhams in London auctioned in May 2011. It was a circular shape with a raised rim. On one side was inscribed 'SS 1789' Samuel, son of Samuel and Ann Spurgeon, born Nov 1789. It was flanked by stylised florets, within a leafy floral garland, pierced for suspension. On the reverse side, painted in blue were two pagodas on an island, flanking a tall flowering plant, within a border of cross-hatching and scrollwork. The tablet came from The Paul Collection and had been sold at Sotheby's in Feb 1935. It was later exhibited in the Lowestoft China Bicentenary Exhibition 1957. A separate group of three Lowestoft birth tablets (dated 1790, 1792 and 1794) was sold in Bonhams London in Dec 1996.

tulip painter jug, by C.E Heanan, 1776

sold for : £12,000 at Russell Sprake

Peter Scully Collection

Two other sources of information are the catalogue from the 1957 Lowestoft Bi-centenary Exhibition held at Ipswich Museum, and the book Lowestoft Porcelain by Geoffrey Godden, Antique Collectors' Club, 1985.