M Haile Small studio dish

Anyone seen any other pottery marked as M Haile.
Little earthenware dish.
I’m presuming Marianne de Trey never called herself M Haile in her short married life?

Now that is interesting. The decoration looks very much like the production earthenware pieces that Marianne De Trey made with apprentices from circa 1950. These were earthenware and nothing like the Brown stuff which is a lot more common. Sam Haile died in 1948, not too long after they started at Shinner's Bridge. The earthenware production stuff had the normal shell mark on them, but I wonder if this could have been a piece made circa late 1948/49 when she was looking for how to try to carry on the pottery after Sam's death.

It is possible. Found in Totnes too. Be nice to find the same motif on a shell marked piece.

Everything points to it being by her but I am just wondering if any real source material from the time still exists.

There are a number of her pots circa 1950 in the V&A collection.

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/search/?offset=0&limit=15&narrow=1&extrasearch=&q=marianne+de++trey&commit=Search&quality=0&objectnamesearch=&placesearch=&after=&before=&namesearch=&materialsearch=&mnsearch=&locationsearch=

Maybe Aberystwyth Univ. Collections would have some examples too

Thank you Philpot and Naomi. Nice examples in the V and A. The 1949 & 1950 marks seem to be her shell and occasionally her de T impressed mark. They do have a little blue on white tin glazed butter dish from 1950. So maybe there was a brief time or moment when she was signing M Haile. I haven’t seen any examples of her work from Bulmer Brickyard in Suffolk. I wonder how she marked work then.

Interesting early de Trey dish on eBay at present with incised “Marianne de Trey” incised signature. Maybe took a while to settle on her shell mark.

I have just been checking in a couple of small books that have about Marianne and another about Sam Haile, as I wondered about Suffolk. However, Sam's earthenware from there was not tin glazed and so, together with where you found it and that fact, I think it rules out it being made there. However, there appear to be very few surviving pieces of Sam's work from Dartington and one I saw illustrated was in tin glazed earthenware and "fired in Marianne's electric kiln there".

The de Trey book is the catalogue from an exhibition at Dartington in 1995 and shows work from 1947 until that date. It details if items were marked or not and, if marked, what mark was used. It would be nice to tell you that the mark is recorded there but it is not. The shell mark seems to have been used from 1950 but there are a few earlier pieces that are unmarked. These are made of red earthenware like your dish.

The Hailes moved to Dartington in 1947 and so it perhaps points to your dish being made at Dartington in 1947/8 before Sam's death. However, I am unable to find any reference to that mark.

I suppose a letter showing her handwriting might help but wasn't able to find if any archives have anything like that.

I’m sure there would be records in the Dartington archives - so maybe somewhere there are letters signed with M Haile.
Thank you Studio P for the information.

The market interest is is Marianne De Trey's porcelain bowls and small vases. Unfortunately her 50's work is not that sought after.

If it proves to be her signature you might consider offering it to the V&A or Aberystwyth st some point, if it only has academic interest rather than a monetary one.

I did think it’s more of a specialist academic piece. It’s a shame that Dartington are more in the business of selling off their artworks and artefacts and land or else I could offer it to them.

Personally I would keep it. A fascinating insight in the career of one the greatest of potters who lived in the Totnes area. Some day someone is going to write the story of what an incredibly fertile environment for studio pottery that small area of the Dart and Teign valleys was.