It's time to check out whether that colourful wacky mug holding your toothbrush or that bold ceramic vase you use as an umbrella stand might be by Clarice Cliff and worth more than you realised.
Ms Joy McCall, specialist in decorative arts at Bonhams in London, says quite often people have been using items by ceramics designer Clarice Cliff who "don't realise what they've got and then realise and suddenly panic. We've somebody who had a vase as an umbrella stand . . . it was actually a £2,000 to £3,000 (€2,539E3,809) vase".
Ms Cliff was far ahead of her time. Initially she painted ceramics with amazing designs. Later, she designed them too. She worked with pottery rather than porcelain, making standard domestic wares which now sometimes "fetch higher prices than 18th century Meissen [the first porcelain producer in Europe]," she says.
Clarice Cliff pieces can fetch "anything from £5 up into the thousands". You could acquire perhaps certain unremarkable single plates or a posy ring for £5. But Ms McCall has plates in a forthcoming Bonhams auction on June 8th which she expects will each fetch £1,000 sterling (€1,506).
A Clarice Cliff piece will not necessarily have been made by Clarice herself, a fact which won't affect the value of a piece. Indeed, Ms McCall believes you can't tell whether or not Ms Cliff herself painted specific items and the specialist would "distrust anybody who thought they could".
She also warns: "They are produced fake as well. There's quite a big fake market." And it can be difficult to identify fakes from the real thing.
A typical Clarice Cliff piece will have a variety of bold, bright colours, "oranges, yellows, bright greens, blues, maybe purple, maybe sometimes pink". It will have "fairly stylised or geometric patterns", that is, it will be adapted rather than true-to-life or it will comprise squares, triangles, circles or lines. Produced from the late 1920s onwards, that was "quite radical", she says. A pencil pot crafted as a smiling "Golly" sitting on a cushion with a little drum is expected to fetch £800 to £1,200 sterling in the forthcoming Bonhams auction. Its value is enhanced because it is "a figural piece and it's part of the nursery range".
A "Circus" tureen, that is, a lidded vegetable dish, designed by Laura Knight is expected to fetch £600 to £900. This would have been designed for use rather than for display. But nowadays people tend to buy them for display. Plates in the auction from the "Circus" range are valued at £600 to £1,000 each. "Circus" plates have some circus entertainer in the centre, usually decorated with crowd scenes around the side. A "Blue Chintz" conical coffee set for six with triangular shaped handles including a coffee pot, cups (more drum than cup-shaped), saucers, sugar bowl and milk jug in blue, green and pink is estimated at £1,200 to £1,800. A Clarice Cliff charger (a big wall plate) is estimated at £1,000 to £1,500, while another charger is expected to fetch £700 to £900. A sabot clog (a decorative clog with crocuses) should fetch £80 to £120. Sugar sifters tend to fetch from £100 up to £1,300, preserve pots range from £50 to the "high hundreds", while cruet sets tend to be valued between £100 to £400.
Ms Martina Noonan, valuer at Adams of Blackrock in Dublin says there is lots of interest in Ireland in Clarice Cliff, it's a very specialised area and "several patterns make a lot of money".
The Clarice Cliff auction at Bonhams takes place on June 8th. Readers are welcome to contact Ms Joy McCall, Bonhams, Montpelier Street, Knightsbridge, London SW7 1HH. Telephone: 0044 171 393 3942.
