was associated with many parts of Britain, including the West Country, Kent, South Wales, the Midlands and Yorkshire, but the main centre of production was Staffordshire. Dishes, bowls, mugs and other domestic wares were made in large quantities by many Staffordshire potters throughout the seventeenth century and into the early years of the eighteenth, often with a distinctive and complex style of slip decoration that makes them readily identifiable. The most famous pieces are large chargers, intricately decorated in raised slip with mottoes and texts, portraits, cross-hatching and other patterns, usually in a complex but appealingly primitive style. Feathering was a favoured Staffordshire technique, creating an intricately patterned surface that looked like marbling. Some Staffordshire slipware potters are known – for example, Thomas Toft – but the majority remain anonymous, including the maker of the owls with their detachable heads. A small number are recorded, mostly in museums, and expert Henry Sandon believes that they all came from the hands of one potter.
During the filming, Henry was barely able to contain his excitement.Clutching the owl to his chest, he said that he had never handled one before. In fact, he seemed quite reluctant to give it back to the owner! He explained how the head could be used as a drinking cup, a type of vessel known in various forms since the Egyptian era. ‘Surviving pieces of Staffordshire slipware are rare and desirable, but this little drinking pot – the body would have been used as a jug and the head as a cup – is in feathered slipware, which is even rarer.’ The lady owner, increasingly bemused both by Henry’s enthusiasm and what he was telling her, was visibly shocked as he steadily increased the value from £500 to £20,000. ‘Well. I never’, was her only response. After the filming, the lady and her owl were sent home in a taxi, accompanied by two policemen, much to the consternation of her mother when she opened the front door.
BACK TO ITS ROOTS
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was little interest in Staffordshire slipware and it was generally dismissed as peasant pottery. It was not properly appreciated until the 1880s, when the first book about it appeared. Entitled The Art of the Old English Potter, it was written by the great French artist and designer L. M. Solon, who worked with Staffordshire ceramics company Mintons from the early 1870s. Since then, high-quality Staffordshire slipware has always been seen as rare and desirable although, unfortunately, fakes have been made since the late Victorian period. However, there was no doubt about Ozzy’s authenticity.
Not long after Ozzy’s Roadshow appearance, the family decided to part with him. He was put up for sale at Phillips auction house in London and sold for £22,000 to an agent acting on behalf of the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent. So the owl returned home and now lives in a special case in the museum, not far from where he was made in the late seventeenth century. Immediately popular, the owl has become a kind of mascot for the museum, and his presence there has greatly increased the number of visitors. On a couple of occasions since then, Henry Sandon has been reunited with Ozzy and, together, the two revisited Henry’s greatest Roadshow moment and the show’s most famous find. Later, the former owner told Henry that she had used some of the money to help support five orphans in various parts of the world.
The Roadshow’s first visit to London occurred in 1990, and thousands queued at the recently restored Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington, now the Business Design Centre. On a busy day, one of the most unexpected finds was a painting by the Japanese artist, Tsuguharu Foujita. The owner, a local man, explained that he had been sitting in a café across the road watching the slow progress of the queue when his wife suggested that they collect a painting hanging on the wall at their nearby home and, when the queue had subsided, take it in for an opinion. Philip Hook, one of the painting specialists on duty that day, was delighted they had done so, for it gave him a chance to talk about one of the most interesting paintings he had seen during his Roadshow career.
Born in Tokyo in 1866, Foujita trained initially at the city’s Imperial Academy of Fine Art. In 1910 he travelled to China and London before settling in Paris in 1913 and living there until his death in 1968. Paris in the 1920s was a turbulent and exciting city, filled with artists and writers from all over the world, and over 100 galleries showed the work of 60,000 artists, many of whom were foreigners. In the cafés of the Left Bank, Foujita could have met painters such as Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine and Picasso, not to mention writers including Ernest Hemingway. It was a period of astonishing creativity, with Paris at the centre of a world that was rapidly establishing the principles and styles of modern art. At first, Foujita painted landscapes, nudes and still-lifes, but he quickly developed his own way of working – a gentle blend of Western and Japanese styles, bringing together Japanese print and Far Eastern painting and calligraphy with Matisse and Picasso.
Philip explained this to the owners and pointed out Foujita’s signature in both Japanese and Western script, reflecting his unique position as the most important Japanese artist working in Europe in the twentieth century. Philip dated the painting to around 1920, a time when Foujita’s distinctive Franco-Japanese style was just emerging, and he valued it at £50,000, a sum that visibly shocked the owners. At that time, the Japanese market was booming, so the painting might fetch less if sold today.
‘If it is night when you arrive, the effects of light and shadow are something only to be painted, not described… At times the excitement of these scenes has been enough to turn the brain of an ordinary weak-minded person like myself… The moon rose again after some time, and we, having stayed two hours, mounted and rode through the mountains of Engaddi.’
Richard Dadd, letter to William Powell Frith, 26 November 1842
With all the pressure and excitement of a Roadshow day, there is little time for detailed research. Sometimes objects – most frequently paintings – have been filmed but left unresolved on the day, pending further investigation. Based on their knowledge and instinct, specialists have made firm pronouncements but require more time to establish these as certainties. In some cases, where subsequent research has proved the specialist right, items have been followed up on a later Roadshow.
The first Roadshow in the 1986 season was filmed in May at Barnstaple’s North Devon Leisure Centre. While walking past a long queue on the way to his table, Peter Nahum noticed a large painting held between two pieces of cardboard. Two hours later, this painting finally reached him and he was able to look properly at what turned out to be one of the Roadshow’s greatest finds. A specialist in nineteenth-century painting, Peter was one of the few people who would have known that he was looking at a long-lost work by Richard Dadd, which just goes to show that Roadshow finds can depend as much on luck as on knowledge.
THE TRAVELLING PAINTER
Richard Dadd was born in Kent in 1817, the fourth of seven children. He began drawing at the age of thirteen, and at twenty he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Initially, he concentrated on subjects taken from history and literature, but his fame really grew in the early 1840s, when he began to exhibit paintings with fairy subjects – a popular theme in mid-Victorian Britain. In 1842, Dadd set off with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, on an extensive tour of Europe and the Middle East, including Belgium, Germany, Italy,
