WriteAntiques

by Christopher Proudlove©Inspiration for these weekly missives, as I’ve said before, comes in many mysterious ways. This week’s is as bizarre as any. Knowing that I write it, a long-standing contact in the antiques business - he frames and sells fine art prints for a living - presented me with a cassette tape he had […]

[Read more →]

What do you do when you find an antique and need to get it identified? There used to be three choices: take it to a museum, a dealer, or an auction house and ask each in turn for an opinion.
The third choice is probably the best course of action because the first might […]

[Read more →]

by Christopher Proudlove©In the post preceding this I wrote about porcelain decorated with magical images made at the Minton factory by French émigré Louis Solon. But that’s only half the story. Louis had a son, Leon, born in Stoke-on-Trent, so he had china clay in his blood. Léon’s innovations earned him his own place in […]

[Read more →]

by Christopher Proudlove©
Minton master potter Louis Solon was livid. Returning home from Minton’s Staffordshire Potteries works one day, to his horror, he found that his maid had blackleaded the fireplace. No big deal, you might think. On the contrary, beneath the gunge were tiles Solon had decorated with an experimental glaze technique over which […]

[Read more →]