Nineteen Twenty Seven
In the previous year of 1926, Charles and Nell Vyse had taken their children to visit their Vyse grandparents at Havelock Place in Shelton. They also made an excursion to the Staffordshire Moorlands to visit their Vyse relatives. At the time, Vyse little thought that he would be making the journey to the Potteries again so soon. However, in the following February of 1927, he received a letter from his mother Sarah Ann Vyse, in which she asks him to return, Stoke-on-Trent. Arriving at Shelton on Monday 14th February he found his father, Charles Simpson Vyse, grievously ill. Simpson Vyse had been at work when he had contracted a chill on the previous Thursday 10th, and returning home and gone to bed. On Wednesday 16th February, just one month from his seventy-first birthday, Vyse senior died of Influenza and Pneumonia, he had been
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Underpinning the figure group, is as Vyse suggests, a simple narrative, ‘One day a young hunter, a hawk on his shoulder is riding his donkey-steed through flowery fields.’ The falconer, urges the reluctant donkey forward, when suddenly it is startled, and braying raucously refuses to move forward. The Falconer stands on a naturalistic base with low relief moulded of plants and fungi, and bearing the incised mark Vyse Chelsea, 1927. The Vyses planned to market it decorated with Nell Vyse’s ivory matte ash-glaze. Unlike the decorated figures where the transparent glaze covers the clay body as a glassy shell. For this composition, Nell formulated an opaque ash-glaze, which during the firing sequence bonded perfectly with the clay-body of the model. The clay body and the ash-glaze are, during the firing process, transmuted into what a potter would term, a good