Vintage Studio Pottery Bowl with Sculpted Lighthouse and Cottage Islands in Blue Grey Glaze

Two tiny islands rising out of a dark sea, one with a lighthouse and keeper's cottage, the other with a fisherman's house and a rowing boat pulled up on the rocks. This vintage studio pottery bowl is a small piece of theatre. The stoneware has been glazed a deep, inky blue grey that pools and ripples like water, and the islands sit on glazed stems so they appear to float above it. Look closely and you find windows scratched into the clay, a lamp room at the top of the tower, a little chimney and a scatter of white pebbles on the shore.

We think this was made in Britain in the 1970s or 1980s, most likely in one of the coastal potteries of Cornwall or the West Country, where sculptural rock pool and harbour bowls of this kind were made by hand for the visitor trade. Each one was modelled individually, so no two are alike. The clay body is a warm, sandy stoneware left unglazed at the rim and foot, which sets off the wet looking glaze beautifully. There is no maker's mark that we can find, which is common with these pieces, and it takes nothing away from the skill in the modelling.

It measures 22.5 cm across and 8 cm high, a good size for a windowsill or the middle of a table. The glaze is bright and intact, and the islands are firm on their stems. The lighthouse has a small chip to its top edge and the clay has the rough, textured surface it was always meant to have, so expect a piece that looks handmade because it is.

We would put it on a bathroom shelf beside a jar of shells and a piece of driftwood, or on a bookshelf where the dark glaze reads as a pool of shadow among the spines. It makes an unusual centrepiece on a kitchen table with nothing else around it, and children are drawn to it immediately. If you collect Cornish or coastal pottery it will sit very happily beside Tremaen, Troika and the rest.

A charming, slightly eccentric piece of British studio pottery with a whole seaside story inside it.