 My name is Simon Alding and I am Director of the Crafts Study Centre at the University for the Creative Arts. The Potter and Ceramic Educator, Dora Billington, writing in 1937, in one of the earliest studies to reference British studio pottery noted that, English potters owe much to the inspiration of Mr. Vernon Leach, who learned in Japan to make stoneware that is in direct descent from that of the old potters of the Far East, with the same harmony of shape, size, colour and texture, and the same magic calligraphy. And to Mr. State Murray, whose magnificent big pots, with their interesting mysterious surface treatments, reach out to possibilities as yet unexplored. This paragraph neatly locates Leach, both in a place of some settled authority and in a place of tension. Leach's training as a potter took place in Japan and he saw at first hand the functional ceramics of East Asia, Korea, China and Japan. Leach's pot profoundly affected him and one cursory reading of his career as a potter is to acknowledge how he remembered and memorialised them throughout his long, lifetimes work. A synthesis of East and West, a place one might say, beyond East and West. In this place he might see, say, a Coney Lake, south-west of Tokyo, in this unpublished painting of his dated 1911, through a Western post-impressionist filter and through the filter of his companion, Japanese painters. Leach first met State Murray in the Artificial Guild in London in 1923, where their pots were exhibited together. As a report noted, they stalked each other around a showcase in the middle of the room before making acquaintance. The relationship remained one of a cool respect. Leach found it difficult to accept Murray's insistence on presenting his pots, not as ordinary vessels but as works of art. And Murray said that he found Leach's theorising on pots and art a little tiresome. Perhaps we can read into this tension a clash between Leach and his arts and crafts imbued moralising tendency and the metropolitan modernist, seeing ceramics as primarily a means of advancing the arguments of art. Perhaps the contested place where they meet is the place where British studio pottery gained its currency and its force. I want to make a focus on Leach's early years as a student and then as an emerging potter, both in London, St Ives and Japan, as a contribution in some small way to the programme inspired by the centenary this year of the founding of the Leach Pottery in St Ives. Leach says in his autobiographical book, The Old Eastern West, that he started his artistic training in 1903 at the Slate School of Art. I always loved him when he said, though his training under the ferocious and unforgiving gaze of Henry Tonks was not always enjoyable. We stood to Ease Old's drawing at Alham's length with charcoal on the chalet paper from plaster casts of Greek sculptures from maul till night. For me this was sheer agony. But, as newly uncovered drawings reveal, his introduction to the Life Class inspired him. A large collection of these drawings are in an archive gifted to the Leach Pottery in recent times, and a smaller number were gathered by one of Leach's friends, Alan Bell, who assisted him with his work as a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is, as well as in the transcription of Beyond Eastern West. So, I'll continue to illustrate this lecture with a number of these works, hitherto unseen. Alan Bell's archive is now in the collection of the Craft Study Centre, and you are among the first to see these works, since they left Leach's hands some time in the 1970s. Drawing Leach Observe took place on the backs of envelopes, even newspapers, on which I have jotted down these thoughts before they vanished into thin air. This habit remained with Leach. In later years an idea for a new pot might be swiftly drawn in the margins of a committee agenda, as a young and aspiring artist. He caught sight of the ship's cook on the way out to Japan, and the start of his new life as an artist, in this unpublished drawing from the Alan Bell archive. Leach's ambitions as an artist advance more rapidly during his short time at the London School of Art in 1908. Here, he says, he reflected on a genuine conviction of living expression in my own work, and so he took the opportunity which presented itself to study an evening class in etching run by Frank Brangwyn. But he also looked at Dutch interior paintings, the portraits of Franz Hals, as well as the works of the post-embrushness. He got to know Henry Lime, Augustus John and Whistler. He started painting in oils, though he was never comfortable with the use of colour, and he focused on etching. His first works are studies of the new model and scenes from London, very strongly influenced by Brangwyn. The London etching represents scenes of trade, boats moored in the docks, as well as the built environment and street scenes. They are either fully representative of the urban scene in front of him, or they introduce a more symbolic element, as in the case of the etching called the Gothic spirit, which he said was one of the best etchings I have ever made. It shows St Luke's Church in Chelsea, and he adds two hovering angels through the side of the building. It is as if Frank Brangwyn has joined up with William Blake. Leach was also influenced by the work and the etchings, particularly of Augustus John, and especially by Whistler. And here the more atmospheric possibilities of aquitint allowed the scene of the Thames to become more romantic and more lyrical. Leach could see how light, shadow and weather could make a landscape or riverscape more dramatic and even poetical. His etchings both in London and later in Japan and in China are improved, it seems to be, by the feeling that he is in the field, feeling the sun and wind on his cheeks. Leach's great friend, Sowetsu Yanagi, commented on this feeling of vitality and nature in Leach's work. Personally, Yanagi wrote, I have no hesitation in declaring that I think Leach's own work, especially his own recent soft ground etching, is distinctly worthy of respect. The example that I have selected for insertion here, done in 1918 and titled Lagoon, is one of his finest efforts. It is one of the scenery of Tegenuma, a place full of memories for me. I remember very well how he made the sketch for it one evening in autumn, as he stood by the side of the lake, watching the setting sun, and his thought could be read very clearly in the feeling of the line. We now have more documentary evidence from the remarkable Alambella archive of the linkage that Leach made between his drawing and his etching. The archive contains a small number of drawings made in the field before they were working out on the etching plate back in the studio. Leach does not seem to systematically display these drawings in exhibitions of his work, and so they have very rarely, if ever, been shown in public. Here, for example, is the un-complished sketch for Little Stack, a scene I think endorsed, and here is the etching on the right-hand side from the second edition. This made it the instigation of Janet Leach, Bernard's third wife, and her partner, Bruce Redgrave, and sold from the 1980s onwards, as they still are to this day in new craftsmen's and dives. And here is an un-published etching of Japanese canal. Leach travelled to Japan in order to fight his way as an artist. In his first publication, a review, 1909 to 1914, he reports that six years ago, my friend, the artist Henry Lam, asked me why I was going to Japan. I was unable to give him an answer, which satisfied him. Looking back, however, I do not for one minute regret step. It is not enough for the artist to belong to the present, still less merely to reflect and repeat the past. However remote and exquisite, he must also be an innovator. Searching the past and present for his own soul, he must build. All actions of the materialization of ideas and the finest ideas are mysterious inspirations. Leach, it seems, was prepared to let fate and the past come to him, but to meet it with hard work, problem solving, and his own detailed interrogations. Leach used etching as a kind of calling card in Japan. His problem solving could be based on new equipment, the massive printing press which made the long journey out to Japan on board the German line-up. It gave him a distinctive offer and the means of attracting, paying students. He published a lecture, the introduction of etching to the Japanese art world in the art magazine Shumi in 1909, not that long off the boat, arguing that etching would be of great interest for talented young artists to learn. It was a bold claim from a very recent alumnus of the London School of Art. Here is an unpublished etching by one of his students in Japan. The Leach scholar, Dr. Sata Hirosezuki, has attributed it to Tom Satoly, a member of the Shirokawa group, and it is a portrait probably of the novelist Naira Shigun. And here is a drawing of the Miss Latimore. Leach had been staying with her family in Japan in China as their drawing tutor. But this strategy to teach and exhibit etchings was set dramatically to change. On the 18th of February 1911, Leach and his artist friend Kenichi Tomimoto met up with some 30 young artists and actors who for recreation were painting pottery. Leach's epiphany for no moment took place, so to speak, in a pottery café. It goes on. In this large, most beautiful tea room, brushes, pigments and unglazed pottery lay about on small felt rugs which protected the matting. Someone who spoke English asked me if I would decorate one of them. And for the first time in my life, I considered what was appropriate on the point. It crossed my mind that pattern must be something different from either the landscape or figure painting to which I was accustomed. Leach had in fact to become a student again. After his pot was given its rakku firing, my dish was returned to me not too hot to handle in a piece of cloth. In thralled I was on the spot, seized with the desire to take up this craft. Leach's first work was made in the lo-fire rakku kiln to pass the time pleasurably and not as a life-changing creative endeavour. But he continued to use his visits to the ceramic holdings of the Tokyo museums as a source for new ceramic ideas. This alborello or drug jar is dated 1912 and it is based on an Italian or perhaps a Dutch Delft original. We can see too how the drawing, perhaps in the museum gallery, is a primer for the glazed painting. Leach went on to find a tutor, Yurano Shigekichi, who bore the honorary title of the 6th Kenzan and he began to extend his range from earthenware through stoneware to porcelain. Leach's etching of his master dated 1924 was presumably printed as a testimony after the death of Kenzan in the Kanto earthquake of 1923 and it relates very closely to a pencil drawing which is dated 1913, now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Leach moved on to stoneware. Here I think is an unpublished photograph marked on the reverse, B.L.'s first stoneware made in Kenzan's kiln. He writes in a note on the reverse, frightful. Leach established his first studio at Abiko along with his friend Soetsu Yanagi. The significance of the workshop as the foundational place of his independent career as a potter was clarified in his work. In this model of the Abiko Kiln workshop for example and in this Yunoni or teacup for daily drinking with one might say the etched lines of the workshop buildings. He stooped to his work. The house adjacent to the studio merged the collections of Europe and ceramics of Asia and this was an important influence from Yunagi. One critic put it, I found my prophet that is Yunagi in a cottage. From the Japanese scene outdoors I passed indoors to a new Japan. Cezanne, Puvista-Cheval, Beardsley, Van Gogh, Henry Lam, Augustus John, Matisse and Blake hung within sight of a grand piano and a fine collection of European music. Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery and paintings filled the places in the dwelling not occupied by western pictures and the western library of a man well advanced with an interpretive history of eastern and western mysticism. Leach was well served here for contextual information and resonant artifacts. Leach's cultured and museum-like rooms served as a stimulus for the work rooms that Leach himself would establish at the Leach Pottery and laid in life in his own private living rooms where pots from these cultures sat as exemplars, conversation pieces, canonical works and, in his great old age, works of consolation. He built up a remarkable collection of ceramics from East Asia, calling them the pots that gave him joy. They were alive to him, even when he could not see them in the blindness of his great old age. The sense of place is deeply important to Leach at his iconography and it was recorded in hundreds of drawings throughout his lifetime. This unique porcelain vase, which I think has never been exhibited in the UK, is in the Kawaii Kanjiro House Museum. Yeah. I'll take a tight laugh right? Yeah, this is... It's true, it doesn't want to. It's a lie. It might be better to take... Yeah, we'll take you out as well. The pot links place to person. And it shows, I believe, the municipal school of pottery booblings in Kyoto, which both Shoji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawai attended. Hamada was to play a profoundly important part in the development of the leach pottery. Leach himself recalled that our association in work and friendship has been a very special one. Shoji Hamada came to me as a young man and asked to come to England with me, although this is an image from a later meeting of the two in Mashiko. We came to St Ives together some 50 years ago, leach reports, and set up a pottery where there had been none, building the kiln, the workroom, the house, much of it with our own hands, then digging the clays, chopping the wood to fuel the kiln, putting pots and experimenting and finally exhibiting in London and in Tokyo. St Ives must have been a dramatic rationale for them both. He had the crucial assistance of Hamada, who, as the St Ives times you ought it on the 19th of November 1920, was imbued with the same artistic temperament as himself, and possessing a knowledge of the old technique acquired by a thorough scientific study. Pottery was defensively described by leach as having a very modest ambition, primarily to deflect rumours circulating in the town, that the cow pasture on which it was built would be lost to some sort of industrial complex. The works to be made there, he said, are to be of a private nature and on quite a small scale. Their intention was to supply genuine handcraft of quality. This a nod to the workshop's moral cause and its financial background, Mrs Frances Horn of the St Ives Guild. The works would be artisanal and not machine-like, sourdough, so to speak, not to owe this. Everything had to be done from scratch. The pottery grew up from what Emmanuel Cooper called rough proposals, which the town suburb then put into a form that would gain official approval. I don't know if Emmanuel saw this extraordinary paper model, drawn by leach, dated 1920 and now happily in the collection of the leach pottery. It describes the pottery to be on a single articulated sheet of paper. Here is another way of recording the place of pots, both as a dream and as a technical drawing. Hamader and Ein leach said, laid the foundation for an oriental climbing stonework hill, the first of its kind in the west. While the kiln chendrude was being slated, and his mates were not present, a casual labourer, George Dunn, took pity on us and came down to demonstrate how to use a long-handled Cornish shovel, with the haft over the left knee as a fulcrum. And so the pottery started, a deeply Cornish and Japanese construction, using methods long past, and the shovel perhaps employed as a tangible heritage tool, in a method of an intangible cultural heritage. Nothing in leach's paper model hints at this labour and graft, with the studio growing out of its Cornish materials. As leach said, I hope to depend on local materials, not only because it saves expense, but because it enables one to choose on the spot exactly what one needs, and to develop in the finished pottery, basic local character. If leach's early pots are potent expressions of the synthesis of arts and crafts and modernism's goal of truth to materials, then the leach pottery too is a studio crafted out of this synthesis, true to its granite, and George Dunn's Cornish shovel. And a place, in fact, where cricket might be played. In the 1920s and before, leach made a series of large, slip-decorated earth and wet chargers. I think nothing like them had been made systematically in England since the late 17th century, when Thomas or Ralph Toft in Bursam Staffordshire had made magnificent examples. Some 40 of these works signed by the Tofts still survive. The designs include the mermaids, unicorns and pelicans, portraits of King Charles II and Queen Catherine, Coates of Arms. The plates are marked around the rim with cross hatching. They resonate with a national iconography and narrative. They are celebratory, vigorous in conception and execution. They commonly offer praise of royal rule, royalty or folklore. Bernard Leach came across these works in 1913, four years into his residence in Japan and some two years after his first exposure to the craft of pottery. He was still working through his ideas as a potter. These works, which he knew not from the museum, but from a book by Charles Lomax, Quaint Old English Pottery, privately published in 1919, which had been given to him by Tommy Motto. This book stood Leach and he attempted to make similar wares, a habit that he kept up when he moved to St Ives. One of his earliest pieces in this mode, perhaps as earliest as this little dish, dating from 1917 and now in the John Driscoll collection in New York, it shows Leach's intense desire to cover surface, to crown it with a fluid imagery and text, as if to load the plate with thought and reference, and then to try and free it from this dense context by the depiction of the bird's rapid flight. It is as if his mind, as well as his hand, are in tumult and this tiny surface is all that he has to express himself as a painter, a reader, a critic and a student of pottery. The little bird, perhaps a dove, perhaps a symbolic bird of peace, perhaps a skylark, perhaps the precursor to the convent or northern diver that fly across the surface of many of his later works is in a kind of wrapped flight. The quotation from Woodpeck's prophetic book of Eurism reminds us of the significance of the mystical poet and visionary artist to Leach and to his Japanese colleagues and artists. Sawetso Yunagi, for example, published a massive volume on play in 1914, the first such work in Japan, and he dedicated it to Leach. The slipway chargers also laid out a template for a series of large chargers that Leach made in the 1920s with iron brushwork rather than slip painting, including one work in the Craft Studies and Collection, which is taken from Indonesian shadow play. And perhaps directly from the shadow puppet, given to Leach by the American teacher Richard Orton, working alongside him at Dalton and Hall in Devon. Shoji Hamada's impact on the Leach pottery was considerable, but Hamada was also an independent maker of gathering strength and voice, drawing on traditional Japanese iconography for some of his earliest and dived stonewares. This large bowl in a Japanese museum collection now and its smaller companion in the Craft Studies Centre displays a stylized presentiment, the Imperial Seal of Japan, carved in white slip in the manner of Chinese Caesar ceramics. And sometimes, as later in Japan, Hamada and Leach found an integrated way of living and working, where one melded into the other, where, as Janet Leach, who was a brilliant and perceptive observer of Leach's infatuation with Japan remarked, over all hangs the air of work as related to life, beauty coming from the daily way of things. It was a small but mostly collegiate workshop with the principles working out their balanced experiences for the good of the pottery. Leach said that, I was trained in art, Hamada in pottery technology. We were not folk potters, nor were we simple country folk like those who had made the best medieval pots or their counter pots in the East. We were artist potters and as such our horizons had begun to be all horizons. We talked of the possibility so long after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of finding people who would be willing to go to training and to continue making pots for the rest of their lives. It was the theology of the studio and its radical cry, its stimulus of independent studios and independent potters. This bowl in the American collection of Dr. John Driscoll symbolizes the friendship and artistic partnership of Hamada and Leach. Made around 1923, it is a gift that Leach made for Hamada on the cusp of his departure back to Japan. It memorializes their friendship and their business partnership. The design akin to Hamada's personal seal is stamped in the well of the bowl as if to record the depth of their creative relationship. I want to conclude my lecture by commenting on one final pot which links Leach to tradition this time of the West rather than the East. This North Devon slip where Harvest joke by W. Fishery Holland is dated 1914 but it's made in a style common for over two centuries or more. It's a joke made in a standard commemorative manner explicitly for Leach and so it is marked with best wishes for a fellow potter. It's a testament of respect and friendship between the potters, the kind of memorializing of a ceramic relationship that we saw just now in Leach's gift to Hamada. In a way perhaps the repertoire of Fishery Holland's slip where master-guidance made in repeat patterns and suit in country kitchens might be seen as a precursor to Leach's own standard wear although the slip wear reached local markets and Leach's standard wear was shipped across the world. I began this lecture with a prospective Leach and State Mariette an exhibition in London in the 1920s and I'll conclude by recalling that one of Leach's greatest pupils Catherine Play-de-Bouviery met Leach in 1923 at an exhibition of his work at the Patterson's Gallery in London and she remarked how she saw the sort of pots I had never seen before quiet, coloured, gentle surface pots with a pleasurable sense of peace about them. Taking up a position at Leach Pottery enabled her to find a way to construct a template for her own lifetimes work making stoneware vessels that referred in shape to the Song Dynasty standards although she observed that nature was the true driving force between her own ceramic orthodoxy. She made her way, so to speak, on from Leach. She said that I want my pots to make people think not of the Chinese but of things like pebbles and shells and bird's eggs and the stone where the moss grows. The Leach tradition was continued as it is to this day by a density of family potters referencing the twin tracks of Bernard's aesthetic the East station and the English folk craft as it were. Bernard's eldest son David for example worked independently at the Lower Dan Pottery in Devon where his own son works now but with his father still to some degree looking over his shoulder. David Leach's vessels assumed a strength of form and a high degree of technical elegance and he was responsible for many important developments in the business running and the technical infrastructure of the Leach Pottery. Janet Leach's arrival at St Ives was a counter-blast. She continued her own practice honed by her own long independent training in Japan and the thinking of a sculpture that had craggy virtuoso presence. They were intuitive with sometimes graceful calligraphic mark-making. Her work stood apart from the conventional aesthetic. It was less mannered, more gestural, more freely conceived although here it kept true to Japanese methods and approaches to the independent vessel. She made sure too that the Leach Pottery was not simply a monument to the heroic male potter. It could be and it was a place of female empowerment, rigor and heartfelt practice a place where the pottery life could be lived fully by all. Hameda you might say is also a Stanley Poseidon when she spoke of her desire to imbue each of her pots with my evolving consciousness of my inner self presenting the vessel with a relaxed yet suspenseful attitude. Let me end with the Leach however. Here he is to bid us farewell unfiltered cigarette in hand sitting in his personal studio upstairs in the pottery ready to talk rather than to listen. Kindly in pause making his forceful contested contribution to British Studio Pottery which started a hundred years ago and which still echoes to this day. He has the last word in this poem written in 1967 he fuses time as he fused east with west to a place where he could feel beyond them both and in doing so at intricate ease with East Asia and his other homeland of some times a moment when everything might be possible in life and in history and in art. All that has been is now and all that shall be is now in this seed moment.