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PREFACE by Jonathan Horne 
ý t was some twenty years ago that I first met an American collector
who was forming a 
fine collection of English stumpwork, medieval ivories, metalwork, and treen.
His interest 
in British pottery was a natural progression, as the often humorous, naive
quality of orna- 
ment found on British delftware and the simple, almost childlike decoration
on slipware 
are not unlike that on English seventeenth-century needlework. 
   Collections are made for a multitude of reasons that are not always governed
by the age 
or rarity of the objects concerned. For example whereas a two-thousand-years-old
Roman 
lamp can be purchased for a few dollars, a nineteenth-century Pratt pot lid
can bring four 
figures. Alternatively an object can be so rare that there are no collectors
for it, and the 
piece is thus unsalable. A true collector is totally dedicated to acquiring
particular types of 
objects and does not simply follow fashion. As the collector becomes more
knowledgeable, 
his or her collection becomes more focused, often with newer acquisitions
tending to 
consist of rarer and more important objects. 
   The desire to collect British pottery goes back a long way. Horace Walpole
had several 
pieces on display in his house at Strawberry Hill. In 1784 his account of
the "China room" 
included two items of delft, a 1647 sack bottle, and a dish depicting Charles
II and 
Catherine of Braganza. Another early collector was Enoch Wood (1759-1840),
who, when 
any construction work was being undertaken in "The Potteries,"
collected fragments of 
old pottery for his museum. Included in his large collection of Staffordshire
pieces were a 
number of slipware platters, cups, porringers, and other shapes. The collection
was greatly 
reduced in 1835, when 182 pieces were presented as a gift to the king of
Saxony. Many of 
these objects can still be seen today in the Dresden Museum. 
   A more recent collector whose name one associates with British delftware
is Louis L. 
Lipski, a Polish expatriate who accumulated a huge collection during the
1940s and 1950s. 
At that time most of the items could be bought for a few pounds. Louis Lipski
was a very 
interesting and knowledgeable man who coauthored the respected Dated English
Delftware. 
When he died in 1978 Sotheby's was offered the chance to dispose of his vast
collection. It 
was eventually divided into four separate sales and, in order not to flood
the market, was 
sold off over a period of two and one-half years. These sales created a great
deal of excite- 
ment among academics and collectors alike, and it was not long after this
that my new 
collector started to show an interest in British pottery. Buying at auction
was a learning 
curve; my client was quick to realize that there could only be one buyer
for any one object. 
In order to acquire the best one had to be prepared to be bullish in the
salesroom, and 
when the first "Rous Lench" sale came along at Sotheby's in 1986,
we ended up purchas- 
ing a third of the pieces, so forming the basis for an outstanding collection.
  The Rous Lench collection was put together by the late Tom Burn, who lived
at Rous 
Lench Court, set between Eversham and Worcester, a sixteenth-century house
with an 
older pedigree. For more than fifty years Burn accumulated a fine collection
of slipware and 
early delft, which was arguably the last great collection of British pottery
in private hands 
in England. Tom Burn acquired many of his pieces from Frank and Kathleen
Tilley, who for 
many years were the top dealers in British pottery. A number of other important
pieces 
now in the Longridge collection also passed through their hands. 
  The list of previous owners reads like a Who's Who, and some of these names
are now 
familiar to us through scholarly works. Frank Falkner, for example, was the
author of The 
Wood Family of Burslem; his collection was sold at Puttick and Simpson in
1920. Some of his 
objects passed through other hands before joining the Longridge Collection,
as did those 
The Longridge Collection 9