Staffordshire Figures 1780-1840 is on its way to book suppliers. I received my advance copy along with a bottle of wine from Schiffer Publishing just yesterday. The book is glorious and packed with over a thousand color images. Thank you Schiffer for making this available to collectors at such an affordable price.

I hate plugging my own books, but if you have even the remotest interest in early figures, buy these books. Together, the 4 volumes are the ultimate reference and show Staffordshire in all its polychrome glory, a whopping 4000-plus images of easily 5,000 figures.  I went to Schiffer's site today and was surprised to see the dust jackets for Volumes 3 and 4, so those volumes too are in production and will be available later this year.  

And lest you think this is the end of the saga, think again! 
I have been working with Herbert and Nancy Hunt's Staffordshire figure collection in Dallas, Texas, and am finalizing my book on this amazing collection for the Hunt family. That book, Holding the Past: the William Herbert and Nancy Hunt Collection of Early English Pottery Figures, will be available early 2015. Whereas all my other books focus solely on enamel-painted figures, Holding the Past also features figures decorated in colored glazes and underglaze oxides. The Hunt Collection is simply mind-blowing. I believe it is the most comprehensive figure collection of the 1780-1840 period anywhere in the world. Nancy and Herbert have built it over four decades, and a good number of the figures are unique. I have truly been privileged to work with this collection, and with Herbert and Nancy and their daughters, Barbara Crow and Libby Allred. The family are warm and generous, and, in that spirit, they are publishing Holding the Past to share their figures with collectors around the world.

When it comes to Walton-type figures, I have repeatedly said that the Walton mark is, in nearly every case, the only way of attributing a figure to Walton. A while ago, I came across an unrecorded leopard with the Walton mark and was very excited at the prospect of adding a 'new' figure to my list of Walton figures. 

As you see, the mark is correct. In fact, lots looks correct here, including the familiar spill vase-with-bocage that we know from other Walton animal models.

But to jump to the punch line, what we have in this leopard is  the work of a very skilled restorer.  The base and spill vase belonged to a Walton sheep of the sort shown alongside.  The sheep was lost and a leopard was put in its place. The baby leopard at its feet is made up. 

When I saw this leopard figure, I was immediately suspicious.  I think what tipped me off was the unnatural assemblage, a sort of stiffness. Clay is soft, so when a figure group is assembled, everything moves beneath the potter's fingers and components touch in just the right way. Remove one component and try and put another in its place after all is fired….that artless, natural fit is lost. Also, the proportions seemed just a tad wrong. I might have expected the lower bocage leaves to nestle around the leopard's body. The gap between the body and the bocage bothered my eye.

I have to have more than a gut feeling to justify my opinions. Here the work is so well done that I had to look really hard to confirm my opinion—and there is only so much testing you can do when you are examining someone else’s prized collection. The owners took the bad news very well, and we agreed that the leopard is a lesson for us all. 

Today, we start with a quiz. No, don’t scroll down for the answer! Instead, put on your thinking cap and see if you can name the man portrayed above. He

• ruled over the largest empire the world has ever seen
  
• was an aristocratic gentleman of great taste and culture and the trendsetter of his day
  
• had an indulgent lifestyle that included a common law wife, huge debts, mistresses, illegitimate children, heavy eating and drinking and gambling
  
• had a scandalous marriage and attempted to divorce his wife with the aid of Parliament, thereby airing all his—and her—dirty laundry before the nation
  
• visited Scotland and created a “tartan craze” that popularized the wearing of tartan attire as we know it today
  
• popularized a style that we today term “Regency”
  

If you are English, you probably have guessed that the man is none other than King George IV of England (1762-1830). As Prince of Wales, he was first in line to the British throne, and he ruled as Prince Regent from 1811 because his father King George III was deemed insane. In 1820, the king died, and the prince then ruled in his own right until his death in 1830.

Believe me, King George IV  does not sound like the sort of man you would have wanted your daughter to marry. His debauched lifestyle would be hard to beat, even by today’s standards, but he really was a news maker and trendsetter in his time. Like all of us, he was a mélange of good and bad. The Duke of Wellington said he was "the worst man he ever fell in with his whole life, the most selfish, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality", but the Duke also described him as "the most accomplished man of his age" and "a magnificent patron of the arts."

Good or bad? I will leave it for you to decide. But we must agree that King George IV was a larger than life presence in the 1780-1830 era. As such, you would expect to find a plethora of Staffordshire figures of him made in that time. Yet, until recently, I have known of only one. Yes, one. That lone little figure stands in the Willett Collection, the Brighton and Hove Museums. A delicious treasure. This past week, another seemingly identical one came up at Woolley & Wallis, and a good friend sent me these iPhone pictures, which, I think, capture the delicious glaze and enamels particularly well.

Is this not a delicious figure? A great face and so well modeled.  Height about 6.5 inches. Above all, what an important piece of history! There are no photographs of this Man of his Moment, and only a few portraits and statues, so this is a very important portrayal. I don’t have a money tree in my garden, so, from my perspective, this figure sold for what was a good amount of money….but in the context of its importance and scarcity, it was dirt cheap. It can't be compared to any of the more mundane figure subjects we collectors covet. It is the essence of its era.To clutch it in your hand is truly to hold the past.

A more difficult question than the one posed at the top of this blog is WHY there are so few figures of George IV. As king and the most influential man of his time, figures of him should be a dime a dozen. I think that the answer lies in looking at the profile of the ORIGINAL buyers of early Staffordshire figures. These people, I believe, were generally decent middle and upper-middle class individuals, . The king's scandalous lifestyle made him persona non grata in their oh-so-respectable homes. In the same spirit, we find figures associated with the Red Barn are uncommon. No decent home would have displayed a figure of William Corder, Britain's notorious murderer. And figures of the boxers Tom Spring and Jack Langan are rare because by the 1820s (when these men fought for England's boxing crown), boxing was not considered a respectable sport.

This past week, this very interesting deer appeared on eBay UK, with a Buy It Now price of just £35.

Deer are pretty run-of-the-mill usually. What makes this one special is that it was made by John Dale. Pointers to a Dale attribution are:

1. The pink flowers with twelve petals (arranged 6 long alternating with 6 short).  You can see a close-up of a Dale flower below.  I have only encountered these flowers on Dale figures and on three marked enamel-painted Tittensor figures (which happen to be the only enamel bocage Tittensor figures currently known.)  Dale routinely painted these flowers pink with yellow centers, whereas Tittensor did not. 

2. That particular swirly impression on the back of the bocage trunk is a recurring Dale feature.

3. The socket bocage. The straight line at the back shows where the bocage was made separately and then placed into a socket. This too is a recurring Dale feature. (Click here to read a previous blog posting on the subject.)

So on balance we have a rather special deer. We know who made it, and we don't know of another like it. To top it, Dale figures are particularly good looking. So why did I not buy it promptly?  I just couldn't let myself go there. The figure needed too much restoration. The ears were not a big deal. But the bocage is another story. Any way you look at it, it would be a very difficult and costly repair....and, when all was done, the bocage would still look like a very restored bocage. The original bits would have been swamped by the restoration. I have yet to find a restorer who can pull off something like this half way adequately.  So with great reluctance, I passed.

At the same time, I didn't forget about this deer. I very much hoped that someone would see it and be willing to love it as it is. I was so happy to see it sold. It is a piece of pottery history and should be preserved respectfully. 

And this gets us back to the question of value. What should something like this deer be worth? Surely more than £35, I think. But, in reality, it isn't. That's because it is not readily sellable in its current state. The cost of restoring is high....and that bocage can't be restored well enough.  Even if restored, the figure is a deer, and deer abound in Staffordshire pottery. So you see why, in this case, rarity, sadly, does not equate with value.

I have one or two figures in my collection that have lost their bocages, and in each case the stump has been rounded and painted. I really think this is the way to go with major bocage loss. If I owned this deer, I think I would have restored the ears and touched the raw bocage edges with green. For relatively little money, I would have preserved the piece and it would give me much pleasure. But taking it to the restorer...the end result would be a lot of money and just another tarted-up deer nobody would want. 

On the topic of value, please start accumulating my new four-volume work. I ask this not to make money because my royalty is next to nothing. But I am grateful to Schiffer Publishing for allowing collectors to have this fantastic reference...and at a bargain price. Talk about value! Staffordshire Figures 1780-1840 vol. 1 is available now, and vol. 2 will be out shortly, with the last two volumes available later in the year, I am told. You can buy the books from any bookseller or from www.hotlanepress.com.