Mark Hewitt Salt-Glazed Stoneware Cup — Cobalt-Decorated North Carolina Studio Pottery, Circular Workshop Monogram Stamp (Post-1995)

Mark Hewitt set up his pottery in Pittsboro, North Carolina in 1983, after training in the English country-pottery tradition that runs back through Michael Cardew to Bernard Leach. Then he landed in the North Carolina Piedmont, which has its own deep history of salt glaze and folk pottery, and the two traditions met in his kiln. He fires big, he fires with wood, and his work sits in museum collections. His cups and mugs are among the forms people reach for most — partly because they're his most popular, and mostly because they're the ones that end up in your hand every morning. This one stands about six inches high. The body is warm tan to buff, and the whole surface carries the stippled "orange-peel" pebbling that salt vapor leaves as it settles in the heat of a wood firing — you can feel it before you can name it. Cobalt blue runs down the wall in vertical trails, and where the glazes met and moved in the kiln they pooled into a pale celadon-grey, with darker iron-rich tones gathering toward the rim. None of it was painted on so much as coaxed out by the fire. The handle is a clean pull, balanced and roomy. This is a working pot, and it knows it. A word on the mark. The base carries an impressed circular monogram — the stamp Mark Hewitt's pottery began using in 1995, which is also when Mark adopted it as his personal mark. It's worth being straight about one thing: over the years, apprentices in the Pittsboro workshop used round stamps too, so the monogram alone tells us this is a genuine Mark Hewitt Pottery piece made after 1995, but not whose hands threw it. We're comfortable leaving that where the evidence leaves it. It's a Hewitt workshop pot, salt-glazed and wood-fired in Pittsboro, and a fine one. It comes from a Hobbsville, North Carolina estate, one of several Mark Hewitt salt-glazed pieces gathered by the same collector — a woman who spent her career in the high-end jewelry trade and brought that same patient, knowing eye to the decorative objects she kept around her. You can see it in what she chose. She knew the difference between something pretty and something good, and she went for good. Details

• Maker: Mark Hewitt Pottery, Pittsboro, North Carolina
• Form: Handled cup, tankard scale
• Material: Salt-glazed stoneware, wood-fired
• Height: Approximately 6 inches
• Decoration: Vertical cobalt trailing, celadon-grey pooling, iron-dark tones toward the rim, "orange-peel" salt surface
• Mark: Impressed circular workshop monogram, base (in use at the pottery from 1995)
• Provenance: Hobbsville, NC estate; one of several Mark Hewitt salt-glazed pieces from the same collection

Condition: Excellent. No chips, no cracks, no repairs, no damage — fully intact and sound. Plenty of wood-fired studio pottery comes to us having been loved a little hard. This one came through without a mark on it, ready for the next person to put it to use.