Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie (1895-1985) was an early pupil of Bernard Leach, but developed her own very personal language of bottles, jars and bowls that were amongst the quietest but most affecting in British studio pottery, widely admired for their understated warmth and tactility. Her pots had echoes of classical Chinese pottery, but her clays and glazes were quintessentially English. The ash glazes for which she became famous evoked the colours of the landscape, the surfaces, only usually modified by simple incising, the feel and patina of the natural world. These objects could almost be overlooked, and yet her work has an almost indescribable tremor, the pulse of the most sensitive making.

She set up a pottery at her family home of Coleshill in Berkshire in the 1920s, joined here by the potter Norah Braden, before moving to Kilmington Manor in Wiltshire after World War Two.

David Whiting