Oil painting, 'A Pottery Shop', Alfred Morgan, 1870s

Morgan's picture shows the interior of what is probably an art pottery in London.

Purchased, 1989

Historical significance: Alfred Morgan (fl.1862-1904) had a long association with the South Kensington Museum. He was a student at the South Kensington School of Art, and he later executed a portrait of Inigo Jones for the Kensington Valhalla project. He also contributed a lunette painting, Sketching from Nature to the decorative scheme commissioned in the 1860s for the museum's National Competition Gallery, where art students' work was annually judged.

Morgan exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere between 1862 and 1904. His subjects were wide-ranging: still life (dead game, fruit and flowers), genre pictures, portrait, landscape, historical and Scriptural subjects.

Morgan's picture shows the interior of what is probably an art pottery firm in London. From the 1870s to the late 1890s there was a great demand for art pottery, and this vogue provided employment for a significant number of female art students graduating from the government art schools in this period. The painting shows the traditional division of labour within a pottery, with men doing the most skilled work (throwing the pots) and the heavy work (processing the raw clay, stacking the kiln) whilst women assisted the potter or worked as painter-decorators. In this instance they are painting vases. Sir Henry Doulton encouraged all three hundred women working in his pottery, notably Hannah Barlow, to initial their individual wares, thus both recognizing their special contribution and creating an ideal field for the collector.

E.1632-1989