Henry Hammond (1914-1989) was one of the best artists to have emerged from William State Murray’s fledgling pottery department at the RCA in the 1930s. Though much indebted to Far Eastern forms and decoration, his pots also had a quintessential Englishness. His brushwork of leaping fishes, dragonflies and wildfowl, of grasses blowing in the wind, were poetically redolent of his native countryside.

Based for much of his life near Farnham, Surrey, Hammond’s work didn’t change radically, but his shapes and brushwork became more fluid, his images more lyrical. Hammond’s pots, mainly bowls and bottles, were essentially canvasses for his skilled drawing, and belonged as much to a graphic tradition that included Robin Tanner and Robert Gibbings as the ceramic inheritance of Leach, Cardew and Staite Murray.

David Whiting