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PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF LEO BAKER, ENGLAND
Lot 197AR

Michael Cardew, Leach Pottery and Winchcombe Pottery
Jug and two bowls

7 December 2021, 10:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £1,020 inc. premium

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Michael Cardew, Leach Pottery and Winchcombe Pottery

Jug and two bowls
Glazed earthenware, incised and painted designs.
Jug: 15.6 cm high
Largest bowl: 19.8 cm diameter
Underside of jug impressed with artist's seal. Underside of one bowl with Leach pottery seal, the other with Winchcombe Pottery seal.

Footnotes

Provenance
Leo Baker, England
Thence by descent to the present owner

The Estate of Leo Baker – lots 196-200

Leo Kingsley Baker (1898–1986), studied at Wadham College, Oxford, where he met the author C.S. Lewis – whose letters to Baker demonstrate a shared love of poetry. After taking his BA in 1922, Baker was from 1922 to 1925 an actor with the Old Vic Company under Lilian Baylis. In 1925 he married Eileen Brookes. Baker gave up the theatre owing to troubles resulting from war wounds, and he and his wife set up a handloom weaving business in Chipping Campden, known as the Kingsley Weavers.

Baker was good friends with Bernard Leach and in correspondence between them dated 1926, Baker states that he and his wife Eileen greatly enjoyed Leach's recent visit. In another letter dated 1925, Baker informs Leach that he is shortly to take a stall in the Ditchling Handworkers' Market and that Michael Cardew (a fellow student at Oxford and godfather to Baker's daughter) had seen some of his weaving. Entries in the diary of Bernard Leach, 1931, show that the friendship continued and Baker had visited Leach at his home in Carbis Bay.

The following lots 196-200 were either purchased by or gifted directly to Leo Baker.

Bonhams wishes to thank the family of Leo Baker for their assistance with the above biography.

Further information referenced from Alyn Giles Jones MA, Catalogue of the Additional Papers of Bernard Leach, Crafts Study Centre Bath, 1987.

Additional information

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