Richard Hugh Neville Batterham (1936 - 2021)

Biography

Richard Batterham (b. Woking, Surrey, UK 1936 - d. Durweston, Dorset, UK 2021) was introduced to pottery whilst at Bryanston School in Dorset and he was later apprenticed to the Leach Pottery (1954-56). He established a pottery at Durweston in Dorset in the late 1950s. Batterham has always been committed to the idea of the craftsman-potter, remaining independent of art and craft societies. His working methods have been much influenced by Bernard Leach (1887-1979) and he made functional pots that have an affinity with the sober colour and vigorous forms of early Korean pots. Decoration is restrained and his shapes enhanced by the free flowing wood ash glazes. He had his first exhibition at the Hambledon Gallery, Winchester (1964), and his first solo exhibition at Crafts Centre London (1965). Recent solo exhibitions include at The Lightbox, Woking (2022) and a display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2021/22).

Batterham worked at his pottery in Durweston, Dorset, for over sixty years. Over the course of his career, he established himself as one of the most distinguished and admired potters of his time. After a two-year apprenticeship at the Leach Pottery in St Ives, Batterham set up his own studio. He was the inheritor of an interwar British tradition of stoneware pottery throwing that combined a reverence for Japanese and other east Asian traditions with a love of British medieval pottery forms. Through the 1960s, his practice was more associated with a counter-culture that sought to distance itself from what it perceived as a world too in thrall to new technologies.

Throughout his life, Batterham kept some of his best work – things he considered particularly successful or that captured the essence of his ambition. Before he died, he worked with the ceramics department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, to put together a substantial display of his own collection of pots. The display showcased the spectrum of his output, from modest, everyday items such as egg bakers and mustard pots to monumental pieces like large lidded beer jars. It was Batterham’s wish that a substantial number of pieces from his personal collection should eventually find homes in UK museums; after his death, it fell to his son and daughter, Reuben and Imogen Batterham, to honour that wish.

Through the course of 2022, the Contemporary Art Society worked with curators at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham; MIMA, Middlesbrough; Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead; The Box, Plymouth; and The Hepworth Wakefield. All have had an opportunity to make selections of groups of pots, benefiting too from the advice of Reuben Batterham, who is perhaps the single most knowledgeable person on his father’s work.