Clarice Cliff was recognized as one of the major Art Deco ceramics designer of the Twentieth Century and possibly the most prolific. Born in 1899, Clarice Cliff started working at the age of 13 as an apprentice enameler. In 1916 she joined A. J. Wilkinson’s Royal Staffordshire Pottery as a lithographer and eventually went on to develop a small studio in Wilkinson’s Newport Pottery, decorating traditional white-ware. Cliff was ambitious and acquired skills in modelling figurines and vases, gilding, keeping pattern books and hand painting ware: outlining, enameling, filling in colours within the outline) and banding (the radial bands on plates or vessels ). Her first original style she named ” Bizzare” and was immediately popular.
By 1929, Cliff’s team of decorators had grown to a team of around 70 young painters, mainly women (called her ‘Bizarre girls’) but also four boys – who hand painted the ware under her direction. Many of these workers were traced in the 1980s and 1990s and they totalled over 100. The Fantasque range evolved between 1928 and 1934 and mainly featured abstracts or landscapes of cottages and trees, and some Art Deco inspired patterns.
Clarice Cliff’s fame and success in the 1930s are hard to fully appreciate now, but at that time there was no such thing as ‘career women’. The publicityshe received in the national press was unprecedented. Cliffs wares were exported all over the world and can still turn up in Op shops, garage sales and Bric a Bac shops.
