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

Small enough to sit in the palm of your hand, and yet it stops you — a deep cobalt ground darkening almost to black, and around it 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, the pattern the firm is most loved for, and on a ground this dark the fruit glows like stained glass.

Run a fingertip over the design and you will feel why a piece this size 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 you would pipe icing, 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 slow, wholly hand-done work, closer to cloisonné than to printing, and it is the reason no two Moorcroft pieces are ever quite alike — the line wavers by a hair, the glaze gathers a shade darker in one place than another.

There is a real person behind the mark. William Moorcroft (1872–1945) was an art-school-trained designer who made his name at James Macintyre & Co. — his Florian Ware took a gold medal at the 1904 St Louis World's Fair and was sold through Liberty, Harrods and Tiffany — before setting up his own pottery at Cobridge in 1913, backed by Liberty & Co. The Pomegranate pattern dates from around 1910 and ran for decades; the deep blue grounds belong to his richest early period.

The base tells you roughly when. It carries the impressed MOORCROFT / MADE IN ENGLAND mark with a painted number, 216 — but not the Potter to H.M. The Queen line that was added after Moorcroft received Queen Mary's royal warrant in 1928, and not the earlier Burslem. That places this little vase in the window of roughly 1916 to 1928. I could not make out a painted W. Moorcroft signature in the photographs; it may simply be faint, so I have dated it from the impressed mark rather than claim more than I can see — in hand, under good light, you may read more.

One honest note on condition: the glaze carries fine overall crazing, the faint web of surface lines that nearly all early Moorcroft earthenware develops over a century. It is a normal characteristic of the body, not a fault in the making, but it is there and you should know it. No chips or cracks are visible.

A small but serious piece — for the Moorcroft collector, the English art-pottery and Arts-and-Crafts shelf, the tube-lining enthusiast, or anyone who would rather own one genuine hand-worked vase with a century behind it than a shelf of newer things.