Last friends visits are bittersweet as I ready to spend the next few months surrounded by my pots
A follow-up to the auction of the Leonard and Alison Shurz ceramics collection I mentioned last week. As you may remember, their three-bedroomed home near Welwyn Garden City had been so full of pots that the auctioneer could barely make his way round the house without breaking anything, and after I bought what I thought were a few very reasonably priced pots, my wife suggested that our own home could soon resemble theirs. Which was a bit of a cheek as she had successfully bid on a few pots herself. What we really need is more shelf space. In any case, I certainly did not suffer any buyer’s remorse. Quite the reverse in fact. My only regrets were over the lots I did not buy. Non-buyer’s remorse if you like. There were several Lucie Ries that seemed to go quite cheaply and I would happily have snapped one up if I had had several thousand pounds to spare. But the lot that bugged me the most was one on which I had put an internet bid at several times higher than the guide price – I couldn’t follow the auction live all day as I had to work – and it had never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get it. Yet when I checked the results later, I discovered that the pot had gone for over 10 times the guide price. Curiously, though, rather than thinking I had dodged a bullet by not paying a price that would have caused me to gulp nervously, my main feeling was that I must have missed out on something very special. That I hadn’t been the only person to have fallen in love with this pot and seen something in it that the valuers had clearly missed. I was also left with the sinking feeling the pot had gone to a gallery and that in a year or so’s time I will see it on sale for twice the price it sold for.
