“Resurrecting the Fame and Glory of the Chelsea Figure”: English Studio Pottery Modeling in the 1920s and 1930s

The revival of figurative ceramics in early twentieth-century Europe was exemplified in England by a group working in the Chelsea area of London: Charles and Nell Vyse, Harry Parr, Gwendolen Parnell, Madeline Raper, Kate Kitching, Phyllis Simpson and Ethel Sleigh, and Jessamine Bray and Sybil Williams. The little attention they have received tends to view them from the point of view of the new studio pottery of Bernard Leach and William Staite Murray, but the author argues that they should be recognized as descendants of the porcelain modeling of the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Staffordshire figures and evaluated in those terms. The paper describes the practice of the Chelsea Potters and explores their origins and training, methods and materials, subject matter and sources, the way their work was exhibited and received, and their markets and the wider artistic context in which they worked.