Sotheby’s is delighted to present a group of ceramics by Dame Lucie Rie from the Estate of Susan Shaw as part of the September edition of Made in Britain. All gifted by the famed ceramicist directly to Sue Shaw, the group is a testament to the friendship and mutual respect between two women who were trailblazers in their fields.

Sue Shaw was the founder of the Type Archive in Stockwell, South London, which she set up in 1992 to house and safekeep for posterity the manufacturing plants of typefounders and letter makers including Stephenson Blake, Robert DeLittle and Monotype. Shaw began her career working for publishing houses including Penguin Books, Chatto and Windus, the Hogarth Press and Faber & Faber before founding her own publishing company, the Merrion Press, where she specialised in publishing and re-publishing rare books and prints.

It was perhaps at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts in Norwich where Rie and Shaw’s paths crossed. Sue Shaw knew Sir Robert Sainsbury and their mutual enthusiasm for modern arts and crafts, including for Rie and fellow potter Hans Coper, led to Shaw designing the catalogue for the The Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, which turned into three volumes published in 1997.

The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts held a major retrospective of Rie’s work in 1981 and during her lifetime Rie’s work was celebrated extensively, from the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition, through to full-scale retrospectives in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.

Born in Vienna in 1902, Rie grew up in an environment steeped in the style and elegance of Viennese Modernism and enrolled at the Vienna Kumstgewerbeschule in 1922 where she learnt to throw. It was also whilst a student that she began to develop her in-depth scientific understanding and fascination with glazes – something which stayed with her throughout her life. Rie established a name for herself on the continent, winning prizes for her work at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937 but following the Anschluss and the union of Austria with Nazi Germany she fled Vienna and, together with her husband, arrived in London.

Rie irrevocably changed the landscape of ceramics in Britain, and the works that she produced help to elevate the position of pottery to that of the fine arts, paving the way for later generations and leaving behind a rich and unrivalled ceramic legacy within the British art scene.

The collection of works gifted by Rie to Shaw is led by the present work, Long Necked Vase with Flaring Rim with 7 further lots by Rie (lots 81-88). Amongst the group is a selection of Rie's stylish functional tableware including an egg cup (lot 85) that Shaw recalled as being Rie’s own egg cup – a wonderful anecdote that encapsulates the friendship between Rie and Shaw.