The Fantastic Flowers of Clarice Cliff: A Celebration of Her Floral Designs

by Leonard Griffin (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $4.19

  Clarice Cliff's Bizarre ceramics, with their spectacular colors and innovative Art Deco shapes, are avidly collected. Here, expert Leonard Griffin explores Cliff's lifelong passion for flowers and shows how many of her most popular designs were inspired by that love.When Cliff (1899-1972) married in 1940, she moved to an Arts and Crafts home in the English countryside with a five-acre garden. There, she learned how to grow the flowers her Bizarre girls had been painting on her pottery. Her delight in gardening is revealed here in never-before-published extracts from Cliff's personal letters, and in her own gorgeous photographs of her garden, reproduced from the original transparencies for the first time.A wealth of colorplates display Cliff's vibrant works. With a glossary and directory of floral designs, this book provides a fascinating glimpse into the private world of one of the 20th century's most important ceramic artists.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.25

  By 1930 Clarice Cliff had become the Potteries first woman designer, famous for her Bizarre ware, her amazing Art Deco ceramics and, in the 1930s, her floral designs, which formed the bulk of her sales - such as her much-loved Crocus design. Reproducing original colour transparencies, and drawing on Clarice's observations on her garden from letters written to a lifelong friend, this book explores her lifelong love of flowers and its impact on her work, showing how many of her designs - her stylized Applique and Latona florals, her Marguerite ware of 1931 or her 1934 My Garden - were inspired by that love and were later to be echoed in the flowers in her garden. It includes an A-Z directory of her floral designs, and valuations on a variety of Clarice Cliff shapes based on Christie's prices.