Needham Pottery: The Ceramics of Mary and Godfrey Newcomb

Description:

Mary Newcomb (1922-2008) is today recognised as a significant British artist of the rural world she inhabited, and her intuitive, lyrical paintings and drawings are exhibited widely. But few people nowadays realise that Mary began her professional creative career in the 1950s making traditional slipware pottery. This book documents the studio pottery she established in 1958 and which her husband Godfrey (1921-2003) took over when Mary focused on painting in the 1960s.

To reveal the history of Needham Pottery is also to tell the story of the creative lives of Mary and Godfrey Newcomb. The pottery began at their first home in Needham, Norfolk, and moved with them to their subsequent houses in East Anglia in the 1970s and 1980s. Of the 90 illustrations which accompany the text, almost 40 are previously unpublished photographs from the Newcomb family archive, which reveal for the first time the rural domestic environment that inspired Mary Newcomb’s celebrated paintings and drawings.

The publication of Needham Pottery in 2021 coincided with a major exhibition of Mary Newcomb’s paintings, Mary Newcomb: Nature’s Canvas, at Compton Verney Art Gallery, Warwickshire.