Austrian-born Lucie Rie was the outstanding ceramicist working in England in the second half of the twentieth century. Born Lucie Gomperz in 1902, she studied at the Vienna Kunstgewerbe-Schule between 1922 and 1926 and left Austria in 1938. Rie worked with Bernard Leach in Devon before establishing her own pottery in Kensington. The glazes used here – yellow uranium oxide and sgraffito (scratched) bronze (manganese and copper carbonate) – are colours Rie used repeatedly in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lucie Rie was honoured three times by The Queen; she was awarded with the OBE in 1968, the CBE in 1981 and was made a Dame (DBE) in 1991.