Below,
the ink-stamped mark
from an early
hand-painted Premier
Potteries (Preston)
jam pot.
Below, a
fine private
collection of early
1930s 'Remued' and
'Pamela' art pottery
made by Premier
Potteries.
Credit: A Guide to
Collecting Australiana
by Juliana and Toby
Hooper (MacMillan
Australia ISBN 0 7329
0222 3); photo
credited to Jim and
Atika Rea.
Below,
incised mark from a
Remued vase. The name Remued
first appeared about
1934. Before Remued,
the name Pamela
was used briefly.
Remued pottery marks
often include a
pattern number but
rarely display the
year of manufacture.
|
|
Shapely,
colourful decorative
wares were
manufactured between
1929 and about 1950 by
the suburban Melbourne
firm variously
identified in
collector’s
handbooks as Premier
Pottery Preston, Preston
Premier Potteries,
and Premier Preston
Pottery. (An
underglaze stamp from
the early 1930s reads Premier
Potteries/Oakover
Road/Preston.)
Premier Potteries had
the distinction of
being a commercial
manufacturer dedicated
solely to decorative
pottery. The firm
never made bricks,
tiles, or sewer
pipes. Premier
was a fairly small
operation that in some
ways bridged the
categories of ‘commercial’
and ‘studio’
potteries.
Their ‘Pamela’ and
‘Remued’ lines of
1930s art wares, now
keenly collected,
represent a high point
in the history of
Australian decorative
pottery, though in
some ways they looked
back to art-nouveaux
and arts-and-crafts
styles, and sometimes
sat uneasily close to
the line that
separates ‘kitsch’
from
sophistication. Still,
their best pieces,
displaying a
remarkable,
spontaneous unity of
flowing form and
colour, are excellent
by any standard.
The
founding partners were
two experienced
potters named David
Dee and Reg
Hawkins. Dee had
been apprenticed at
Campbell’s in
Launceston, and had
established a
formidable reputation
as a thrower at the
Hoffman pottery works.
Hawkins had trained as
a pottery decorator in
Southern England.
Facing unemployment
when the Great
Depression hit
Australia’s large
pottery firms, the two
opened a small factory
in 1929 for producing
hand-crafted pottery:
Dee threw the pots,
Hawkins decorated
them, and Dee’s son Walter
was taken on as
glazer.
Some of the first
pieces from Premier
Potteries were
hand-painted in
underglaze enamels on
slipware, in designs
created by Reg
Hawkins. Common
elements were
sponge-dabbed or
painted ‘cottage-style’
scenes of windmills or
English country
cottages accompanied
by ’mottoes’, or
homely inscriptions.
These designs clearly
drew on the English
1920s south Devon
pottery styles
of Mottoware and
Torquay ware.
Another design style
employed in early
Premier wares used
abstract arrangements
of colour outlined in
black. The
experiments with this
style probably owed
something to the
phenomenal success of
the designs of Clarice
Cliff for the
Wilkinson pottery firm
at Staffordshire.
Around 1932, the
well-known ’Remued’
style began to appear
(though the name came
somewhat later),
using
richly-coloured,
free-flowing glazes
combined with artfully
press-moulded or
hand-modelled gumnut,
gumleaf, or Australian
wildlife forms—also
in naturalistic,
flowing lines.
These applied
decorations were the
work of an artist
named Margaret Kerr,
about whom not enough
is known, and the
expressive glaze
combinations were
apparently the work of
David and Walter
Dee. (This style
may also have owed its
appearance to
developments in
southern England: the
Candy Ware of Devon
had successfully used
similar two-tone
flowing
glazes.)
After the
mid-thirties, there
seems to have been a
progressive diminution
of colour, a
replacement of curves
with straight lines,
and an abandonment of
modelled decoration,
giving way finally to
a general blandness in
post-war pieces from
Premier Potteries. The
firm closed at the end
of 1955.
The best place to learn about Premier/Remued
pottery is www.remued.com/
[ Up ]
|
|
Back
|
