George Owen was so secretive about his work that he refused to let even his son watch him work, which means it could have been a lonely few weeks when he was working on this pierced model of a shoe for Royal Worcester. Worked with panels of honeycomb and bands of ‘pearls’, the rare 15cm model of an 18th century court shoe – with an incised signature and date for 1915 – would have been among the most expensive items sold by the factory, and things haven’t changed all that much: when it was offered at auction in the UK in late July it sold for $51,000.
Owen created his famed effect by carefully piercing the outer wall of the vessel to create an intricate, net-like effect on the external body, working with the constant risk of failure. In 1896 The Pottery Gazette reported that: ‘the artist [Owen] tooled every one of these minute apertures without having any tracery, or any other assistance whatever to guide him to regularity, except his eye and his hand… if on the last day of his work his knife had slipped, and so made two ‘holes’ into one, the whole piece would have been ruined’.
Working behind closed doors, Owen would stop and hide his tools – that he had personally made, often filing them down from the stays of women’s corsets – if anyone entered his workspace. His son produced the thin-walled vessels that he perforated, but even he was forbidden to watch his father working.
Owen often worked on multiple pieces at a time, using a pair of compasses and callipers to measure the distance around a vessel and mark the point for each incision. He was ambidextrous and swapped his cutting knife from one had to the other as he worked his way around a vessel.
