Roger Fry’s career as a potter began in 1913 when, at the annual Ideal Home exhibition of the Omega Workshops decorative designs and furniture, a potting wheel was conspicuously installed in their model interior. Soon after Fry negotiated a deal with Poole Potteries enlisting a team of “sympathetic men” to carry out his designs by hand. Fry is undoubtedly better known for his art criticism, connoisseurship and painting, but from this moment in 1913 onwards pottery was central to the system of aesthetics he built at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which became hugely influential to the generations of modern artists that followed him. He wrote how “pottery is of all the arts the most intimately connected with life, and therefore the one in which some sort of connexion between the artists mood and the life of his contemporaries may be most readily allowed.” Pottery was envisioned as a vital conduit for the communication of previously elevated artistic ideas. By applying such ideas to objects that could be used in the home and held in the hand, by all members of society regardless of class or privilege, art’s ability to guide people towards a better form of living would, according to Fry, be at its most immediate. Good pottery should produce “forms expressive of life and character”, according to Fry. This meant pottery that was handmade and did not bare the mark or uniformity of the machine, which “substitutes an ideal exactitude for a felt approximation. Where the machine enters the nervous tremor of the creator disappears”. A tender, bodily, even erotic, experience consequently informs Omega pottery. As well as the potters at Poole, members of the Omega Workshops such as Fry himself, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Winifred Gill would regularly take to producing objects like this coffee pot. Their impressive consistency (given they were not professional potters) is balanced against idiosyncratic inconsistencies – ‘the nervous tremors’ – that distinguished each individual maker. Vanessa Bell summarised her experience of potting for the first time in direct terms: “the feeling of the clay rising between one’s fingers is like the keenest sexual joy!” In the second decade of the twentieth century, suddenly pottery could be experienced as sexual and political liberation, and it was at this important historical moment that the principles of the Bloomsbury Group were still being formed. The art historian Judith Collins has explained how Fry “felt that pottery was a form of sculpture” and therefore “its every proportion and dimension was pregnant with expressive power. Indeed, for Fry pottery may well have been the essence of significant form” – that is, an arrangement of colour, shape, and line that combine to stimulate our aesthetic sense and emotions. Colour is, therefore, an important element in Omega Pottery and there was a range of coloured glazes used by the Workshops under Fry’s direction. Initially, ceramic objects such as this coffee pot were produced in white and black glazes. From 1915 the deep cobalt blue of the present work began to be used. A milky green celadon glaze was also occasionally applied. Each of these glazes show Fry was conscious of developments in European awareness of East Asian ceramic ware, but early Italian and North African pottery were also prominent influences. Fry and the Omega’s production of ceramics underwent a noted shift in 1915. Patrons were facing financial pressures and, as men left to fight, the Omega’s workforce was reduced. This resulted in a move away from expensive and labour-intensive furniture and decorative commissions to an increased emphasis on ceramics, books and wearable fabrics. New and especially attractive glazes, such as the present work’s cobalt blue, reflected this refocussed strategy. The importance of ceramics even finds its way into Fry’s independent work ‘Essay in Abstract Design’ (1915; Tate), a radical collage inspired by contemporaries like Picasso in Paris. The work integrates two buses tickets, one of which is marked to Mitcham, the location the pottery where Fry would travel to throw pots for the Omega. The Omega coffee pot is amongst the larger and more complex objects produced by the workshop. They were never produced in vast quantities and it is unclear how many of each colour were made. The only other known versions are two in white glaze versions are held in the Courtauld Gallery, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.