Blanche's Beasties

Blanche Vulliamy was one of thirteen children. Her father, a banker's son, was not only a local solicitor, but also a coroner, active in the church and liberal politics. His wife, a Belgian, was a water colour painter of some note. She, and the creative craftsmen of the Vulliamy family, were doubtless an enormous influence on Blanche'╪تs artistic development. The Vulliamy family, French Huguenots who fled originally to Switzerland, were well known clockmakers.

Blanche finished at the Ipswich School of Science and Art in 1884, later spending two years at the Kensington School of Art initially training as a portrait painter, probably influenced by her mother's art. Although she was an excellent artist and exhibited paintings at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1898, this was not to be her metier. In 1890s she spent some time living with her grandparents in Torquay, and undoubtedly came into contact with local Potters, possibly spending time at the art school there too. She soon turned to a less conventional medium of expression than portraits. She initially started crafting her grotesques from natural or found objects and materials before moving on to produce her creations in pottery, supplying Liberty of London by 1897 and in 1899 she opened her own sale room in Pitt St, Kensington. Talking to a journalist from The Penny Pictorial in 1900 she explained how she was inspired by the natural world, and that it "took only a few strokes to transform the fantastic in nature's work into the absolutely grotesque."

She exhibited at the Arts & Crafts exhibition in Alexandra House in 1900 with one journalist referring to her "most original" exhibition of pottery grotesques as showing "humour and novelty." Queen Alexandra bought some examples of her work from this exhibition, and the Princess of Wales (later Queen Mary) is also known to have acquired some pieces from the 1904 exhibition.

Blanche's creations were variously called Bogeys, Smiley Poggs, Beasties, Uglies, and also gnomes and goblins. They are full of character and brim-full of laughter. Whilst her idiosyncratic and curiously appealing grotesques attracted a lot of contemporary interest, she was clearly influenced by the gothic revival with artists and sculptors being inspired by church gargoyles and folklore and influenced by scientific interest in Darwin's theory of natural selection.

The fashion for the grotesque was shaped by the arts and crafts movement with its emphasis on individual design and creation. Bridgford posits that it was also a reaction to the doom and gloom of Victoria's long mourning for Albert, introducing an element of playfulness into ceramic production. Undoubtedly novels such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in 1897, also played their part.

Sonia Solicari describes how the demand for original and individually decorated wares had "blurred the boundaries between mass industry and the small artisan ventures that had sprung up throughout Britain, in response to the Arts and Crafts return of the artist and maker to the centre of production." Solicari continued,"This aesthetic in turn lent itself to the kind of sculptural humour best seen in the work of George Tinworth for Doulton but also in the leafy creatures of Burmantofts, the Martin brothers, and, later in the century, Blanche Vulliamy, who was seen as an exemplar of the spirited new women designers. Such work catered for the growing vogue for the grotesque that saw the humorous ceramic into the 20th century. Of course, the malleability of clay meant that ceramic was the perfect medium for manipulating the contorted expressions and impish grins of this increasingly popular aesthetic."

Solicari went on to discuss how the "sense of freedom and fun was infiltrating ceramics at all levels lead to a democratisation of humour in ceramic design that was fuelled, in part, by an art pottery movement that what that was at once earthy and artistic." She also felt that the impact of the bright new majolica and faience colours gave artists more scope for their ceramic experimentations. This is evident in the intarsio, faience and grotesques produced by Wileman at this time and certainly in Blanche's own ceramic productions.

An article in the Lyttleton Times (1904) gives perhaps the best description of Blanche's creations, her method of working and the influences on her. The journalist writing the article comments, "the curious thing is that all of the figurines were laughing - whether at you or with you, you can not quite make out, at all events at first. But when you get over the initial sensation of embarrassment at being the apparent cause of so much merriment, you begin to wonder why you have never noticed what a variety of smiles there are in the world. For here no two smiles are alike; each Goblin has his own expression of mirth. And, more surprisingly still, you find yourself instinctively recognising that each smile reminds you of some particular individual - little caricatured, maybe, just a little." Blanche mentioned how a society lady had recently held a dinner party to which the King was invited and had pointed out various of Blanche'┬€╪تs figures as being of living statesmen, which apparently amused the king no end, but was entirely the product of his hostess's imagination.

Again Blanche emphasised the influence of the natural world on her work, describing being influenced not only by living creatures but also by shells and seaweed, continuing, "My snake tea- service is quite original, and has brought me many orders. Frogs, toads, fish, are all utilised humorously as designs for jugs, jars, vases and ornaments of all descriptions." Blanche's creations tended to have a purpose, and were not merely decorative, particularly as she matured as a potter.

Alex Yeats article in Scandy refers to her being inspired by fish and animal skeletons, and the spirits of the vasty deep in creating her goblin brain offspring. One certainly senses that she had considerable affection for her creations from reading the newspaper interviews with her.

Blanche made her own moulds from her initial handmade creations which were then reproduced by workmen from her designs and moulds. She commented in the interview that, "great care is necessary, for, like Louis Wain's cats, expression is everything with my eerie troupe, and the tiniest error may result in a failure." Another problem that she had was unauthorised copying of her designs, so that she started not only to incise her name onto the pieces but, like Wileman and Shelley, also registered a number of her designs.

Blanche also wrote poetry, and encouraged by J M Barrie, a modern morality play Give Heed which was performed before the war and reported on favourably in various newspapers.

In 1915 she was one of several lady artists exhibiting at The Ryder Galleries, Conduit Street and was the only one to have a room to herself. The Pall Mall Gazette in an article entitled "Occult Art" in June 1915 was somewhat less than impressed with the other 3 exhibitors' efforts which were described as being produced by "psychic and unconscious means" with "strange and forbidding things emerging, and part of the general effect of them is a sort of attraction of repulsion. Of Blanche's work, whilst still among the things of the spirit, the art is conscious and deliberate." The writer noted that she had "as lively and impassioned an imagination as any of her three fellow artists, with the added qualities that she can both draw and use colour quite beautifully. A number of her pictures here are poems in colour and line no less than in spirit."

The article notes that the morality play "Give Heed" was performed on a miniature stage every afternoon with Blanche reading the text and manipulating the figures with a musical accompaniment, commenting "the production is a delightful innovation in a picture gallery, and should on no account be missed." She had made the miniature stage set herself, with its 26 figures (also described by The East Anglian Times 9/6/1915 as being "extremely well made and revealing great ingenuity." Part of the proceeds were to be donated to the National Committee for Belgian Relief.

Ipswich Museum, to whom she donated her personal collection of her “Searchlight” pastel drawings and prototype grotesque figures before her death, notes that she designed freelance not only for the Baron, Branham, Watcombe and Royal Vale potteries of the Torquay area and also for Wardle of Hanley and Wileman. Undoubtedly, her designs for the Torquay Potteries and those produced in her own name were more numerous than anything she produced for Wileman.

Wileman’s grotesques, dating from 1898, are said to have been produced by Rhead and Morris, but there is a certain hint of Blanche’s style in the monkey jug and the grinning expression on the Intarsio cats, and miniature cats, which is strikingly similar to those of the Aller Vale cats.

However as Karen Bridgford points out, in her article in the Scandy magazine, the similarity of grotesque designs between different potteries "indicate that designs and styles were “taken” by decorators and throwers between potteries.” We only know for sure that she designed the devil cup and saucer. Unusually the design in the pattern book records that copyright is reserved to Blanche Vulliamy