Antique Moorcroft Vase – Pomegranate Pattern, Cobalt Blue Ground, Tube-Lined Fruit & Berries, Impressed Made in England, Art Pottery 1920s

A small art-pottery vase, three and a quarter inches tall, on a ground of cobalt darkening almost to black. Around it runs a band of late-summer fruit: a pomegranate cut open to show its seeds, a cluster of grapes, a plum, scattered berries, leaves curling between. This is Moorcroft's Pomegranate, and on a ground this dark the fruit reads like stained glass.

Run a fingertip over the design and you feel why a piece this small still matters. Every outline stands slightly proud of the surface, a fine raised thread of clay. This is tube-lining: liquid clay piped from a nib the way icing is piped, drawn along each contour to build a little wall, into which the coloured glazes are then laid by hand so they pool and deepen inside every cell. It is closer to cloisonné than to printing, wholly hand-done, and it is why no two Moorcroft pieces are alike — the line wavers by a hair, the glaze gathers a shade darker here than there. A printed ground is flat under the finger. This is not.

The base dates it by what it does not say. The impressed mark reads MOORCROFT, MADE IN ENGLAND, with a painted shape number, 216. There is no Burslem, dropped around 1916, and no Potter to H.M. The Queen, added after Queen Mary granted her warrant in 1928 — so the vase falls between those two marks in the record.

William Moorcroft trained as a designer, not a factory man. He made his name with Florian Ware at James Macintyre & Co. — gold medal at St Louis in 1904, sold through Liberty, Harrods and Tiffany — then set up his own pottery at Cobridge in 1913 with Liberty money behind him. Pomegranate dates from about 1910, but the deep blue grounds belong to his richest early years.