This interpretative historiography investigates and examines the precepts and critical writing on English Studio pottery between 1910 and 1940. It argues that Roger Fry's Formalist theories provided the critical framework for the appreciation of early studio potters such as William Staite Murray, Bernard Leach, and Reginald Wells. Through his inclusion and appreciation of Fauve ceramics in the exhibition Manet and the Post Impressionists to his primitivist interpretation of early Chinese and English mediaeval pottery, Fry identified the main idioms of early studio pottery. This realigned individual artistic ceramic practice from being the focus of Antiquarian appreciation to being a subject of contemporary understanding.

Herbert Read's ideas of Mediaeval pottery as 'plastic art in its most abstract form' augmented Fry's Formalist theories and facilitated the Modernist appreciation of pottery as a form of non-representational art during the 1920s and early 1930s. William Staite Murray, in particular, adopted these ideas and his monumental stoneware pottery and membership of the Seven & Five Society led to Read describing him as 'a canvas free artist.'

In parallel to Read and Staite Murray, Bernard Leach's advocacy of neo-vernacular slipware and.'Sung Standard' stonewares promulgated Ruskin and Morris's social concerns and ideas on utility and craft. This led to the emergence of the Leach school in the late 1920s with the work of Michael Cardew, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie and Norah Braden. Leach positioned this production of innovative domestic pottery as a bridge between English handicraft and design and it became part of the discussion about English national identity which culminated in the exhibition English Pottery Old and New at the V & A in 1935.

Beginning with the critical response to Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910, and concluding with the reviews of Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book in 1940, this thesis has undertaken a comprehensive literature search of writing on studio pottery in the English art, design and national press. The primary texts reveal the voice of critics and potters over three decades, and chart the development of studio pottery from a nascent discipline in 1910 to a coherent movement at the outbreak of the Second World War.

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