Lucy Rie and the modern touch.

The Potter Who Whispered Modernism into Clay

If Bernard Leach was the father of British studio pottery, Lucy Rie was its rebellious daughter — quiet, exacting, and modern to the bone.

Born in Vienna in 1902, Rie trained under the refined yet functional ethos of the Wiener Werkstätte, and fled to London in 1938 as war darkened Europe. There, she began again — not as a celebrated artist but as a maker of ceramic buttons and tableware in her small studio near Hyde Park. It was in these intimate, restrained beginnings that her radical touch took shape.

Where Leach’s pots spoke of earth and ancestry, Rie’s pieces murmured of the future: slender stoneware vases with subtle manganese bands, delicate sgraffito, and glazes like quiet sighs — honey, ash, tin-white. She made pots that could sit quietly in a Bauhaus apartment and still hold the soul of the wheel.

In post-war Britain, her studio became a haven of clarity. Her collaboration with Hans Coper — another refugee potter — added a new dimension to the space: two voices, distinct and independent, yet deeply resonant. Rie taught at Camberwell and inspired generations, but she herself never stopped refining the curve of a lip or the tension of a line.

When your with us at Mayfield Street Studios, have a think about Lucy Rie and her beautiful restraint — turn your own surfaces into a story about poise.

Sometimes, clay sings in the gentlest register.