Rye Pottery

Clip – Hand-Painting the Wife of Bath

We’re loving the buzz around the launch of “The Wife of Bath: A Biography” by Oxford Uni Chaucer specialist Professor Marion Turner. The book is published by Princeton University Press & has had incredible reviews. And lots of you will know that we love anything that celebrates & demystifies the many women who have been airbrushed from history.

So to celebrate we filmed our very own Wife of Bath figure being painted so you can see how we bring our own amazing version of this renowned medieval woman to life. We know lots of our collectors love seeing how we actually make and paint things here, so this is a short 1 minute insight into Chaucer’s most famous pilgrim being hand-decorated by one of our talented team – using freehand brushwork. You can see how the colours change after she’s been fired for the second time.

Discover more about the professor’s book by visiting the Princeton Uni website here and if you’d like to see more about the 37 figures in our hand-made Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Collection do click here.

Rye Pottery & Canterbury Cathedral go way back …

The Wife of Bath

Here at Rye Pottery we have a special interest in the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to whom we send our very best wishes. We’ve supplied the shop at Canterbury Cathedral with our ceramic figures and tiles based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for more years than some of us like to remember! We also produce a special tile of the Thomas a’ Beckett Tomb for the Cathedral.

But what some of our collectors may not know, is that Rye Pottery’s figures from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were born from a request by Canterbury Cathedral for its gift shop in the early 1970s.

Mr Steele who launched the shop, introduced us to sculptor and painter Gordon Davies and suggested we should work together to produce something featuring one of the pilgrims – The Wife of Bath. Discussions and then work ensued, and lo the Wife become the very first in a what is now a series of 38 ceramic figures based on Chaucer’s Pilgrims. And the rest as they say is history!

Gordon went on to design our Rye Nativity too and in the year 2000, then Archbishop George Carey took a complete set of the Rye Nativity to Jerusalem as a gift to mark his Millennium visit.  We recently heard from a Rye Pottery collector who had seen it on display out there but sadly his camera had failed him at the crucial moment.

So we’ll always be grateful to Canterbury Cathedral and its inhabitants, not least to Mr Steele for introducing us to Gordon, who did a great deal of wonderful work at Canterbury over the years, as well for us here at Rye.

Click here to take a look at the full range of Rye Pottery figures based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

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