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HOW TO STAY SPRY From charity-shop staple to the peak of chic, Constance Spry’s pottery vases have become modern collectors’ items. Catriona Gray considers the legacy of one of Britain’s most innovative florists
By Catriona Gray for Country Life
Although I’d read quite a bit about Constance Spry before pitching this feature (her biography is incredible and well worth Googling), it was quite hard to find anything that had been written about her ceramics. Spry was a pioneering florist, who really changed the way people arranged flowers, and she had a habit of commandeering all sorts of unusual vessels (such as baking trays) to hold her creations. She found it hard to buy the vases she wanted and ended up designing her own, most famously for the Fulham Pottery.
These fell hugely out of favour after Spry’s death, especially as fashions changed and moved towards minimalism, and lots of them ended up being consigned to charity shops. Then, a few years ago, they started cropping up on Instagram – florists were once more turning to Constance Spry vases to show off romantic arrangements of flowers. I kept seeing them pop up on different people’s Instagram posts, and realised that they had become very collectable. I was a bit slow off the mark, sadly, as the prices were already soaring by the time I started searching eBay listings. However, the fact that they were now so in demand meant that I knew it would make for an interesting story.
For this feature, I spoke to various collectors of Spry’s ceramics, many of whom were savvy enough to start their collections when you could still pick up a vase for a couple of pounds. Now that they often sell for hundreds, there’s a much higher barrier to entry. But there are lots of other makers from the same period who also produced vases of a similar style and shape – I listed a few of them in the sidebar on the final page of the article, for anyone who’d like to buy one of their own.
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