Perfect Pieces Specialists in British Pottery

Although it’s not widely known (or seen), the Carlton Ware brand has been resurrected in recent years by well-known collectables publisher Francis Joseph.

Examples of the company’s new wares can be found on it’s website, www.carltonwaredirect.com and they also offer a newsletter (free initially, but then you have to make a purchase or subscribe for £35 per year…).

I haven’t seen much of this new Carlton Ware around on the secondary market yet - which isn’t surprising, as it is being made in extremely low volumes. This means you can at least be assured of exclusivity if you do buy any of these pieces.

The designs available are a mixture of licensed version of timeless classics - such as the Golliwog and the children’s designs of Mabel Lucie Attwell - and genuinely new designs, mostly by Marie Graves, a ceramic artist based in Stoke on Trent. Many of the shapes, however, are clearly freshened versions of old designs.

If you’re interested in Carlton Ware then it is well worth taking a look, although to me, these wares don’t seem to be being made or marketed intensively enough for Carlton Ware to take a significant place in the market again.

Carlton Ware is undoubtedly one of the more popular potteries amongst the visitors to this website, and with good reason.

During nearly 100 years of production, the company produced some wonderful pieces - from Art Deco to Chinoiserie to tableware. Unfortunately, Carlton Ware didn’t always keep very good records of their shapes and patterns - or if they did, they’ve got lost since!

As luck would have it, there are some very dedicated collectors out there who have gathered together a vast amount of information on Carlton Ware and put it together into two extremely useful books and a website.

CarltonWare.com is run by Dr Czes & Yvonne Kosniowski - two extremely expert and dedicated Carlton Ware enthusiasts. Thanks to a combination of careful research and obsessive collecting, they have built up what must be the world’s most comprehensive database of Carlton Ware patterns and shapes.

Obviously this is too good to give away completely for free - but what they have done is combine books and the internet in a very effective way.The Kosniowskis have published two extremely useful books:

• A Pocket Guide to Carlton Ware
• Carlton Ware Catalogue and Price Guide

The way it works is simple - you just have to enter a piece of text from a certain page of one of the books - then you get full access to that section of the website.

To get online access to CarltonWare.com’s complete Carlton Ware pattern database, you need a copy of the Pocket Guide - an excellent book which we own and use regularly. This also gives you limited access to the shapes database.

To get full online access to CarltonWare.com’s database of shapes, you need a copy of the Carlton Ware Catalogue & Price Guide.

Although you do have to buy at least one of the Kosniowski’s books to be able to use their website, the books (especially the Pocket Guide) are really good and an essential tool for anyone interested in collecting, buying or selling Carlton Ware. Our copy of the Pocket Guide is incredibly well used and there is no better way of identifying Carlton Ware patterns.

Of course, if you want a more limited but completely free resource to get you started, you can take a look at the Carlton Ware Price Guide section of our site - which includes photos, full details and sale prices of all the Carlton Ware we have sold in recent years.

The Kosniowskis also run a VIP membership section which provides a regular, free Carlton Ware newsletter and notification of updates to their website. The newsletter never fails to include some great Carlton Ware pictures - it’s worth signing up for that alone!

We received a pleasant surprise in the post this morning - the latest (May/June) edition of Antiques Info magazine, containing another of our articles and a selection of photographs from our archives.

The article is “20th Century Ceramics: Are We Exporting Our Legacy?”,  and takes a look at current collecting trends for Carlton Ware and Wedgwood lustre wares, observing how many of the finer examples of these pieces are presently being sold to overseas collectors.

The article has been well-illustrated with a range of photos from our archives and those of Antiques Info, and this is always one of the more interesting antiques magazines on the market, with lots of good quality information. It’s well worth a look if you are passing a newsagents.

We should have one or two more articles appearing in various antiques and collectable magazines in coming months - I’ll post updates here as and when they are published as the dates aren’t all fixed yet.