56 - OWL: Martin Brothers, Southall, modelled by Robert Wallace Martin, September, 1903

Summary

Salt-Blazed stoneware decorated with blue, brown and sage-green slips. Marks: ‘R.W. Martin. & Brothers. London & Southall. England’ and ‘R.W.M. S^c.’ incised round the neck; ‘9 1903/R.W. Martin & Bros/London & Southall’ incised on the base. Height 103 cm. C.41–1928.

Robert Wallace Martin (1843–1923) and his brothers Walter (1857–1912) and Edwin (1860–1915) set up a pottery at Pomona House, Fulham in 1873. At first they had their stoneware salt-glazed at the Fulham pottery, but after moving to Southall in 1877 they were able to make, decorate and fire their own work. Another brother, Charles (1846–1910), managed the business and sold their pottery at a shop and gallery in Brownlow Street, off Holborn in London.

Wallace Martin, who had trained as a sculptor, concentrated on modelling. He had a lively imagination which gave rise to a procession of grotesque and humorous creatures masquerading as jugs, spoon-warmers and toast-racks. His bird jars, known as ‘Wally Birds’, are vaguely rook-like and have curiously human expressions. His owls are truer to nature, and were probably inspired by earlier slipware and salt-glazed stoneware owls. Most of these birds are 20–35 cm high, but Martin also made a few giant owls, of which this example measuring 103 cm is the largest known.

In 1893 he is said to have made a punch bowl ‘in the shape of a monster owl’ for the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, a literary club founded in 1872 which has an owl as its emblem. According to the ceramic historian J. F. Blacker, Wallace's first model developed a firing crack and was not dispatched, but another arrived safely only to be destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.