Question:  What’s the difference between the two pieces of pottery pictured above? Answer:  Around 30 years. They are both made by the same celebrated studio potter Eddie Curtis, who, with his wife Margaret, has run a pottery at Middle Rigg, County Durham, since 1979. Eddie is recently home from exhibiting his current work at … More From the past but not a blast

This old rug measures 4’10” by 3’7″.  It’s in poor condition with all four edges frayed and some fairly threadbare areas. There are no obvious holes but if you hold the rug up to a window you can see some small areas where light shines through.  Some diagonal lines in the weave with differential wear at … More Wagireh

Here’s a fat jolly friar or monk, bought (as usual) in my local auction room. He’s simply but nicely modelled in terracotta, with very realistic facial features and a slightly baroque look to the drapery of his robes. He might perhaps have been painted or glazed with polychrome enamels at one time, and you can see some residue … More Terracotta Friar

My wife and I are extremely fortunate to live in a house with five intact Victorian fireplaces.  These afford endless more-or-less geeky and more-or-less obsessive-compulsive opportunities for arrangement and re-arrangement of artefacts upon the long shelves above them known as mantelshelves or mantelpieces. The mantelpiece (our preferred term) is inevitably the focal point of any … More Mantelshelfies

The house being full of stuff, I’ve started to buy interesting things for the garden, in the hope of finding more random treasure.  One of the first purchases was a fragment of carved stone, won at a local Edinburgh auction for just £24. It’s roughly 50cms across and 50 cms tall and 20 cms thick, … More Walter Mawer’s Stone

In 1973 I was working in a junior office job for a large housing association.  My department was based in three large and rather grand inter-connected terraced Victorian houses in Edinburgh’s fashionable West End.  The offices were on the ground and three upper floors, and the basements were used as storage space for old broken … More Berlin Woolwork

Every year (well, for the last two years and maybe again next year) I spend a very enjoyable week’s intensive study of art history at the summer school run by the Courtauld Institute of Art in Central London.   They run the school over four weeks, with eight separate courses offered each week.  In 2105 I … More Not a Rembrandt

A few years ago at a local auction I bought a wooden sculpture on a whim.  It didn’t cost much.  It turned out to be a statue of Saint John the Evangelist, a mediaeval masterpiece which had been lost for more than two centuries after being looted from a church during the French Revolution.  I … More Saint Benedict

Here’s a picture of my latest purchase – another big brown pot to add both to my large collection of big brown pots, and to the mystification of many of those around me.  I got it last week at Franklin Brown’s (http://franklinbrowns.co.uk/about.html), one of our local auction rooms here in Edinburgh.  It cost me £38.00 … More Salt Pig

A few posts ago I wrote about the excitement and anticipation of being asked to have a look at our friend Anne’s late mother’s ceramics collected in France. We went.  We saw. A bit of an anti-climax.  I was right in thinking that Helen had had good taste: very attractive stuff, but nothing outstanding or valuable.  … More Anticlimax follows anticipation