Portrait of a Gallery - The Scottish Gallery

Alan Caiger Smith MBE
Baluster Vase c.2001 red earthenware with lustre 23 h x 18 d cms
Alan Caiger Smith was born in 1930. He studied painting and drawing at Camberwell School of Art in 1947
before graduating from King’s College in Cambridge in 1952. He set up the Aldermaston Pottery in 1955.
Working with a team of seven or eight assistants, he produced painted tin-glaze ware and lustre decorated
pottery of the highest quality with surfaces richly decorated in precise brushwork. Caiger Smith is an
acclaimed ceramicist and academic, books by him include Tin Glaze Pottery in Europe and the Islamic world
and Pottery, People and Time.
Caiger Smith represents the long history that the gallery has had showing classic and contemporary
studio ceramics. Henry Rothschild curated several Studio Ceramics exhibitions in the gallery from the
late 1970s which included works by Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Ewen Henderson, Alison Britton and Sutton
Taylor. He introduced the gallery to a wider and more sophisticated range of objects to which our audience
responded in a positive way. Due in part to this legacy, we now have a reputation for showing international
work alongside national artists.
His work can be seen in many public collections worldwide.
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