She said her name was Miya and in perfect English – but with perhaps a Polish or Croat accent – she explained that she was from a group of young artists who were setting up a not-for-profit gallery in Liverpool.

They needed funds and were going door to door to try to raise capital by selling some of their art.

It got me to thinking how great it would be to have the ability – and spare cash – to be able to talent-spot up and coming young artists and buy their paintings?

Just think of the untold riches that might have fallen to the lucky punter who bought Picasso … or L.S. Lowry … or whoever, before their work rocketed in value.

Just think what you could achieve if you had the millions to go out and indulge yourself – Charles Saatchi-like – (perhaps that should be John Moores-like) in the Liverpool Biennial exhibitions and then watch the artists you backed become household names – with prices to match.

Or do you agree with me that that is the worst possible way to buy – and appreciate – art?

In my book you should buy from the heart, not from a head ruled by profit and loss. Buy because you fall in love with a painting or work or art, because you cannot live without it, not because you see it as a “good investment” (or worse still because someone says it is a good investment).

If what you buy goes up in value, fine. If it doesn’t, so what? If you love the piece, what it’s worth (or what it cost) is meaningless.

So, climbing down from my soapbox, I ask you to direct your attention to the pictures illustrated here.

Not all of them are to everyone’s taste and not all of them are out of the reach of collectors like me, with champagne taste and beer pocket money.

But what they have in common is that they and pictures like them are being snapped up by investors who have little regard for their artistic merit.

The paintings were among the star lots in an auction of Welsh fine art on Saturday September 25 at the Colwyn Bay saleroom of Rogers Jones & Co. According to auctioneer David Rogers Jones, there is no end in sight to the price spiral such works have been enjoying.

The sale was the third of its type to concentrate solely on the work of Welsh artists or Welsh subjects, but the search for quality pieces gets ever harder.

“We’ve hunted high and low for flagship lots,” Mr Rogers Jones said, “and as before, the pictures everyone wants are by Sir Kyffin Williams.”

The auctioneer is not the only one searching out Royal Academician’s work. “People are scouring the country looking for his pictures, but they are being bought as commodities like investors would buy stocks and shares,” Mr Rogers Jones said.

Oil paintings that were fetching £6,000-7,000 two or three years ago are now twice that and the auctioneer said he had seen one work, fresh to the market from the easel of the living artist, priced at £20,000 in a North Wales gallery.

The latest area to see big price rises at Williams’ watercolours. “Their value has shot up,” Mr Rogers Jones said.

“They were selling for £1,500-2,000. Now people who can’t afford his oils are buying his watercolours and the prices have doubled.”

Mr Rogers Jones said it was Williams’ work from the 1970s and 80s that he most admired. At first sight, a landscape of a Welsh coastline, for example, looked to be painted in black and white.

On closer inspection, the picture was made up of a dozen different tones. “Put you nose up to one off his pictures and you see a merging of subtle tones. There’s three greens, three greys, three different blacks. Stand a yard away from the picture and the effect is three-dimensional.”

Such an example was on the cover of the sale catalogue (and illustrated here). The oil on canvas was titled Caernarfonshire coastalscape with the Rivals and at 35.5 by 35.5 inches, it had great wall power. Buyers agreed – it sold for a mid-estimate £18,000.

The other Williams oil in the sale was always ikely to be dearer still. Showing a farmer and his sheepdog on a mountain path above Llithfaen, the work fetched £19,000.

Watercolours are less stratospheric. A view of Welsh cottages with farmer and dog on a path at Cilgwyn sold for £3,500-4,500 and “Slate Tip, Bethesda” sold for £4,900.

Representing good value is a pencil and colourwash picture of a farmer and his dog at an above top estimate £2,900, while buyers like me were attracted to artist’s proof linocuts: an interesting self-portrait sold for £340 and a Farmer John Jones sold for £390.

Another artist whose work is becoming increasingly sought after is Charles Wyatt Warren, who painted for pocket money – and probably light relief from his job in the finance department of Caernarfonshire County Council.

David Rogers Jones recalled that Warren was particularly adept at painting silver birch trees. He also had a unique production line in an outhouse at his home.

All his oils are painted on hardboard panels. Using a thick ball of string, the artist would rig up a “washing line” and suspend five sheets of hardboard from it using clothes pegs.

Working on the sheets consecutively, he would paint mountains on each in turn, then go back to the beginning and add a lake and then the prerequisite silver birches.

The results were sold in local galleries and cafes at prices ranging from £10-15.

Today, they fetch anything from £300-600 and six featured in the Rogers Jones sale. The one illustrated here shows a disused Anglesey windmill and millpond, which fetched £450, despite the lack of silverbirches!

antiques@chris-proudlove.co.uk

Pictures show:

Above Llithfaen, the most expensive lot in the sale at £19,000

Caernarfonshire coastalscape with the Rivals by Sir Kyffin Williams, sold for £18,000

Charles Wyatt Warren’s Anglesey windmill landscape, sold for £450
(Pictures Rogers Jones Co)

Of course, if I was to go on to become one of the country’s richest individuals, and if my children were to marry into the upper classes, joining families whose power is second only to royalty, then things might be different.

Then, perhaps, a few of hundred years from now, my two plates might turn up in an auction where they sell for so much money, pictures of them appear in the newspapers.

My great-great-grandchildren, if I ever have any, should not hold their breath. None of the above is likely to happen, and anyway, my plates came from an advertisement in a magazine!

The plate pictured here, is the exact opposite of my own. So well known it has its own name, the “Three Graces” plate is fully documented and the names of the three girls and the even the painter who decorated it are known.

Which goes some way to explaining why, when it was offered recently by Worcestershire auctioneer Philip Serrell (of TV antiques programmes fame) it sold for a record £29,900.

More importantly though, the plate was made at William Billingsley’s short-lived porcelain factory near Cardiff and today, because such prized pieces rarely come to the market, collectors will pay until it hurts.

Billingsley’s factory was founded on the site of an old Swansea copper works but production lasted for just 62 years, from 1764 to 1826, before the business crashed into bankruptcy and its stock in trade auctioned off to pay creditors.

In the process, it produced some of the most beautiful and technically finest porcelain ever made.

The Swansea story starts in 1764 when William Coles, of Neath, built a pottery producing cheap, utilitarian wares from local clay. The factory was built on the site of an old copper works between the River Tawe and where Swansea High Street station now stands.

Coles died in 1778 and the factory was taken over by his sons. In 1790, George Haynes became a partner in the company, acting as factory manager. He set about expanding the premises and employing skilled workmen, changing its name to the Cambrian Pottery.

Ware decorated in underglaze blue was the mainstay of production at this time, sometimes (although not always reliably) identifiable by small marks such as stars, crosses, hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs impressed into the base of the pieces.

In 1802, William Dillwyn bought a controlling interest in the factory and set up his son, 24-year-old Lewis Weston Dillwyn as proprietor. Haynes stayed on and the firm was called Haynes, Dillwyn and Co.

Haynes left in 1810 to start up the rival Glamorgan Pottery and Dillwyn went into partnership with his manager, Timothy Bevington, and his son, John.

New investment doubled the firm’s capacity under the name Dillwyn and Co., Swansea, the impressed mark appearing in a straight line, as a broken circle or as a horseshoe.

In a separate development, wealthy entrepreneur William Weston Young persuaded the gifted ceramic artist William Billingsley to leave his native Derby and set up a porcelain factory about 40 miles away from Dillwyn’s venture at Nantgarw, near Cardiff.

Billingsley, together with master potter Samuel Walker, set his sights high and attempted to emulate the products of European manufacturers of fine porcelain.

Unfortunately, however, the “glassy” nature of the body required such high temperatures to cause it to vitrify that losses in the kilns grew to unacceptable levels and the venture resulted in near financial ruin.

In 1815, however, Dillwyn invited the near bankrupt Billingsley and Walker, to join him at Swansea so that the former could add porcelain to the earthenware he was already producing.

The venture achieved some success, but in 1817, Dillwyn temporarily withdrew from the partnership to manage his late father’s massive estate. In the meantime, the factory was leased to the Bevingtons.

It was a disastrous move. Billingsley and Walker returned to Nantgarw, leaving the father and son to founder. Only small quantities of porcelain were produced at this time and little more earthenware.

Business picked up on Dillwyn’s return in 1824. Large quantities of earthenware were made, much of it decorated in blue and white transfer printed patterns, the most famous of which is the so-called “Ladies of Llangollen” design.

Inspired by the story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby who went to live at Plas Newydd in North Wales in 1776, the pattern shows the two women riding horses through a landscape with the houses and church of the town in the background, the medieval bridge over the River Dee and Castell Dinas Bran in the foreground.

In 1837, Dillwyn bought the lease of the rival Glamorgan Pottery and closed it down two years later. However, there followed a general decline in quality and attractiveness of Dillwyn Swansea to the point, in 1870, when the factory was closed.

Increasing mechanisation and overwhelming competition from the Staffordshire Potteries produced the sort of price war in which there could be only one winner: the pot banks of Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns.

Billingsley and Walker, meanwhile, lasted at Nantgarw only until 1820, when the partners moved to work for Coalport in Shropshire.

However, they left today’s collectors a legacy of Welsh porcelain of sometimes quite outstanding beauty. Its particular appeal is its soft white translucent body which provides a perfect “canvas” for highly detailed and colourful botanical and landscape painting.

In addition, it is also prized for the elegance of shapes developed by modeller Isaac Wood. Many of the leading ceramic artists were employed, including one who is recorded as having moved there from the Sevres factory.

For a new collector the scope is bewildering by its very anonymity. Best advice is to visit museums where Swansea pottery and porcelain is on show (notably the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London),

Potential buyers should also visit auction salerooms where examples have been catalogued by specialists with the necessary knowledge to identify the good from the indifferent. The advantage of the latter is that pieces can be handled and inspected closely.

Then read as much as you can on the subject, particularly The Pottery and Porcelain of Swansea and Nantgarw by E Morton Nance, a scholarly tome to be found in good reference libraries.

There is much to learn … and not many clues for the newcomer. The blue and white earthenware, the stoneware and soft paste porcelain produced by the Swansea factories is often unmarked.

That means buying examples presuming they came from South Wales potteries is something of a gamble. But it also means many collectors pass them by when pieces come for sale in the auction room or antique shop.

Learn to recognise patterns and styles of the various factories and you could find rich rewards.

antiques@chris-proudlove.co.uk

Picture shows: A fine plate from William Billingsley’s short-lived factory near Cardiff, painted by Thomas Baxter and traditionally known as the “Three Graces”. It depicts three beautiful young ladies in Regency dress – the daughters of Thomas Coutts, banker to George III. The three girls, Susanna, Francis, and Sophia, grew up to become highly prized brides. One went on to marry the Earl of Guildford, one the Marquis of Bute, and the other Sir Francis Burdett. The plate was first sold at the Burdett Coutts auction in 1922 and in 1938, it became the property of a Welsh porcelain collector F.E. Andrews. The plate will stay in Wales – it was bought last month by an anonymous Welsh collector for £29,900. Photo: Philip Sorrell Auctioneers

Our house move to the North Wales coast has introduced us to a whole new hunting ground for weekend antiquing excursions and we braved the recent blizzards to visit a new fair at the Llandudno Junction leisure centre.

Sadly, the weather had beaten a few of the exhibitors but the blaze of colour from the stands of dealers who had made it more than made up for the gloom outside.

More colourful than most were those tables displaying groups of a unique pottery – the so-called Gaudy Welsh, a name which describes perfectly the hand-painted decoration applied primarily to tea sets, bowls and jugs,

Made in both England and Wales between 1820 and 1860, the earthenware, creamware, ironstone and bone china is decorated in charming patterns picked out in underglaze cobalt blue, often in panels, rust or burnt orange and copper lustre, while floral decoration often included pink lustre, green and yellow, all on a white background.

It appealed to people of modest incomes in both Britain and the United States, and even today connoisseur collectors are dismissive of Gaudy Welsh. It’s not as posh as the porcelain from Meissen, Chelsea or Worcester or any of the wondrous products of Japan or China, although that is undoubtedly where it has its roots.

Gaudy Welsh china is pretending to be something it is not and never will be. It was produced for working class families and a piece cost only a few pennies. It had aspirations, though, like the people who bought it.

The pots produced by factories such as those in Swansea, Llanelly and subsequently Staffordshire, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Sunderland, are thick and coarse, covered with pitting and often woefully out of shape. That aside, Gaudy Welsh is naive in a folksey way, unpretentious and delightfully cheerful.

The name for the distinctive ware appears to have been coined by American collectors. Their Welsh counterparts know it by more prosaic names such as Welsh lustre, peasant enamel, cottage Swansea or simply cottage ware.

Fact is, more Americans than Brits collect the stuff, perhaps because it was exported in huge quantities to that country, most of it through the Port of Liverpool and into Philadelphia, where it was particularly appreciated by Dutch settlers.

Interestingly, it is most commonly found in states where Welsh settlers established expatriate communities in the latter part of the 18th and early 19th centuries – notably New York, Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The appearance of Gaudy Welsh coincided with a transformation of life in Britain. The Industrial Revolution was beginning to get up steam (literally), railways had replaced horse-drawn carriages and the population was on the move from the country into the towns, seeking work in the factories.

The result was a burgeoning middle class which could afford the finer things in life and a working class that couldn’t but was striving to make it so. A home decorated with cheap and cheerful china ornaments was tangible proof that a family’s move from country farmhouse to industrial slum was a wise one.

Interestingly, Welsh manufactories that produced Gaudy Welsh were responsible for less than a quarter of total production. They include the Cambrian Pottery in Swansea; the South Wales Pottery in Llanelly and the Glamorgan Pottery, also near Swansea.

The former began production in 1764 and passed into the ownership of Louis Weston Dillwyn. In 1814, he persuaded the potters from the ailing Nantgarw porcelain factory to join him and production of earthenware pots – including Gaudy Welsh – began there in 1826.

The Llanelly factory, situated a few miles west of Swansea, began production in 1840 under the ownership of William Chambers and exported Gaudy Welsh to America.

The latter firm began in 1814 on a site near the Cambrian works run by Dillwyn’s rival George Haynes. They copied Cambrian shapes and patterns and skilled workers were enticed away, but Dillwyn got his own back … he bought the pottery on Haynes’s death and closed it down.

Staffordshire potters were quick to spot the potential market of Gaudy Welsh and were soon producing versions of their own having pirated designs from their Welsh cousins.

The same happened subsequently among Newcastle potteries, notably Robert Maling at his Ford Pottery; Thomas Fell of the St Peter’s Pottery; John Dawson at North Hylton and Dixon & Co., of the Garrison Pottery, all in Sunderland and, in Gateshead, the Sheriff Hill Pottery and Richard Davies & Co., of Salt Meadows, South Shore.

Surprisingly little is known of the Staffordshire firms involved in the enterprise, although they produced by far the largest quantity of Gaudy Welsh.

One of the earliest manufacturers was William Adams of the Greengates Pottery, Tunstall, later taken over by John Meir, while the well known Enoch Wood of Burslem exported Gaudy Welsh to America until 1846.

One of the largest Potteries manufactories that may have produced Gaudy Welsh is Spode, while other possibles are Mellor, Venables & Co., of Burslem and Thomas Walker of Tunstall.

Edward Whalley of Villa Pottery, Cobridge, is known to have exported the ware to America but knowledge about others is scant. Staffordshire makers are reckoned to have produced 80 per cent of all Gaudy Welsh ever made, but the identity of other factories is pure speculation.

Whatever the source of any Gaudy Welsh you may come across, one thing is certain: sweated labour produced it, much of the work being done by children, sometimes as young as eight.

Pottery workers led lives of hardship. Wages were low, disease was rife, homes were inadequate and education unlikely.

The result was the charming, rustic naivety of Gaudy Welsh, which can be compared with the production of the thousands of flatback chimney ornaments which are also highly desirable today.

How many different Gaudy Welsh designs were created by often untrained outworkers, paid piece rates by their employees, is open to debate.

A figure of 300 is quoted by some reference works, although only half that number is likely to be found, even by the most ardent collector.

Successful patterns came and went in a matter of a few years depending on fashion, although there are similarities which reappear throughout the period of production.

Panels, cartouches, grape leaves and petal shapes are predominant, mostly representative of the Japanese Imari pottery the ware was attempting to emulate.

Considering the ware was decorated by a largely untrained workforce whose only concern was the number of pots it was possible to produce in a day, is it not surprising that pattern shapes degenerated from the recognisable to the incomprehensible.

A case in point is the so-called blue rocks pattern found on a large number of later pieces. Originally, this featured three bright blue leaves surmounted by a bud appearing at the top of the centre leaf. As time passed, the leaves became three successively smaller blobs, painted one on top of the other, looking more like rocks.

Collectors who know about Gaudy Welsh are able to date pieces accordingly, although that kind of knowledge takes a lifetime of study. I would be happy to acquire examples of Gaudy Welsh simply because it is colourful and fun. It wouldn’t matter a jot who manufactured it, but living in Wales as I do, it would be good to be supportive of my adopted homeland.

Pictures show, top: Gorgeous Gaudy: This magnificent teaset, decorated with the Lotus pattern sold last November for £330

Below, left to right: A Gaudy Welsh Drape patterned teapot, bread plate and four cups and saucers, together worth £150-200
A pair of Allerton’s Gaudy Welsh Sunflower jugs with handles modelled as serpents. They’re worth £100-120
A large Gaudy Welsh jug decorated with the Prestatyn pattern. It’s valued at £70-80