Sunshine in Suburbia - Clarice Cliff and the Inter-War Home

This month Christie’s auction house in South Kensington will brace itself for the second of its biannual sales of ceramics by the inter-war designer Clarice Cliff. Despite holding the auction in its largest hangar the company knows that people will have to queue for the viewing and will line the hall at the time of the sale. Yet, this is no auction of artworks by a grand master. Clarice Cliff (1899-1972) was an industrial designer who modelled the pots on the breakfast tables of Britain in the 1930s and sold them by the million. She was the first woman to design both shapes and decoration of commercial tableware, and the first to be appointed company art director of a major firm. Clarice Cliff’s Bizarre label pots, though neither rare nor one-off, have attracted a following among collectors that has raised her profile to doyenne of British Art Deco. Earthenware tea-sets which cost only eight shillings in 1931 (even then about half the price of a good china or Wedgwood service) now sell for upwards of £2,000.