Picture of the Month: December 2023

Our Picture of the Month for December is a triumph in aesthetic elegance by the distinguished ceramics designer and potter Gordon Mitchell Forsyth RI ARCA (1879–1952). Painted in 1930, it boasts a subject and colour palette that would sit admirably in any contemporary interior that draws on the painterly eclecticism of the Bloomsbury Group. But this painting also has a fascinating story to tell, about the history of art, craft and manufacturing in the UK, and the role that the objects depicted within the painting play in this history.

Gordon Forsyth played a pivotal role in British ceramic design. His innovative work as art director at the tileworks of Minton Hollins & Co in Stoke-on-Trent and at Pilkington’s Tile and Pottery Company near Manchester, has led him to be called 'the magus of the mid-20th century pottery industry'. An influential teacher at Burslem Schools of Art, he was tutor to a number of notable students, including Clarice Cliff and Susie. In 1936 Quentin Bell (son of Vanessa and Clive Bell) went to Stoke on Trent to learn about pottery and was influenced there by Forsyth.

Forsyth additionally worked in watercolour, oil paint and stained glass. In our Dutch interior at Veere, he brings together various pictorial elements in a way that meditates on the nature of art itself, referencing the domestic interiors of the Dutch Golden Age and the self-conscious staging of Vermeer—with, of course, radiant, artfully placed lustre pots.