A slightly mottled dark blue ground covers the shaft of this dramatically long-necked vase...

A slightly mottled dark blue ground covers the shaft of this dramatically long-necked vase and frames the oval devices that provide the main decoration of the body. Within these ovals a horizontal band, revealing in part the stoneware clay color, cuts across incised organic shapes glazed in richer earth tones. The raised tube lines defining the ovals reflects a decorating technique popular in British potteries since the eighteen nineties; the beading that edges the horizontal band recalls patterns of a decade or so earlier. These diverse elements are combined in a dramatic, but certainly coherent whole.

Frank Butler overcame his deafness to become one of Doulton's most important artists, working in an evolving progression of styles from 1872 until 1911. The assistant whose monogram also appears on the vase has not been identified. The clear, relatively simple shapes employed in this pattern may reflect Butler's early work as a designer of stained glass.

In 1815 John Doulton entered into a partnership to produce stoneware which eventually in 1...

In 1815 John Doulton entered into a partnership to produce stoneware which eventually in 1854 became Doulton & Co. The product was functional--bottles and pipes--with decoration a very secondary concern. John's son Henry, however, entered into a relationship with the Lambeth School of Art in the early 1870's to establish a studio to produce unique artist-decorated pieces, one of the earliest flowerings of the art pottery movement. Doulton expanded into table wares and porcelain after acquiring the Staffordshire pottery, Pinder Bourne, and in 1901 received the warrant to become Royal Doulton. Art production in Lambeth reached a peak in the 1890's and continued well into the twentieth century, though with a slow decline in quantities produced and decorators employed.

Generally the Lambeth studio emphasized surface decoration, reflecting contemporary interest in flat patterns. Typically designs are incised. Colored glazes complement the pattern but were seldom allowed to completely obscure the natural tones of the stoneware body.