Vintage Royal Doulton "The Potter" HN1493 – Hooded Monk Sculpting Pottery, Charles Noke Design, Discontinued Bone China, England 1960s

A Royal Doulton character figurine in fine bone china — "The Potter", catalogued in the maker's HN system as HN1493, designed by Charles Noke in 1932 and produced through 1992. The composition: a hooded monk in a deep maroon robe, seated cross-legged on a small cobalt-blue plinth, leaning forward to examine a pot he has just shaped on his lap. Around him, six or seven hand-finished pieces of pottery — small jars, bottles, urns — each picked out in a different glaze: green, orange, soft yellow, deep red. The plinth itself is finished in a deep, glossy cobalt blue. The face under the hood is painted with proper individual features — brow furrowed, eyes lowered to the work in his hands.

Charles John Noke (1858–1941) was Royal Doulton's Art Director from 1914 to 1936, and the architect of the firm's reputation for sculpted character figurines. In 1913 he launched the HN system — HN for Harry Nixon, the senior decorator who developed the colour palettes — a numbered catalogue that gave each figurine a permanent reference and credited the original designer and decorator. Over eight decades Royal Doulton issued more than 4,000 HN figures; collectors track them by HN number the way coin collectors track date marks. The Potter sits in the first 1,500 — early Noke era, the period collectors consider the artistic peak of the line, and stayed in production for a remarkable sixty-year run before retirement in 1992.

The subject — a monastic potter at his wheel — carries a small piece of recursive humour: this is a Royal Doulton craftsman, in fine bone china, making a ceramic of another craftsman in clay. Every glaze on every miniature pot around the monk's feet was hand-mixed and hand-applied by the Royal Doulton decorators of the day — small-scale demonstrations of the firm's range of glazes, executed inside a single figurine. The figurine is fully hand-painted, with the painter's signature mark beside the HN number; no two HN1493 figurines are identical because each decorator's hand differed slightly in the brushwork on the miniature vessels.

Since HN1493 was retired in 1992, supply is finite — Royal Doulton has not produced this figure for thirty-plus years, and the surviving pieces circulate through the secondary market in slowly diminishing numbers. Comparable HN1493 figurines on eBay and Etsy in 2025 run in the CAD $165–$280 range depending on condition; this example is in excellent condition with all pottery vessels intact and the glaze fully present on the monk's robe, hood, and hands.

A piece for the Royal Doulton HN collector building toward a full Charles Noke shelf, for the working potter or ceramic artist who appreciates the recursive humour of the subject, for the literary / library interior that wants one piece of expressive figural sculpture, or as a craftsman-to-craftsman gift.