LUSTRE POTTERY.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—Mr. Moorcroft, of Burelem, should have reviewed his beliefs before he penned his ideas of the "lustre" process of pottery decoration. Your reviewer's statement that "lustre is applied on the glaze and fired at a low temperature" is absolutely and literally correct of all the types of lustre dis- cussed in the review—Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, Italian, and Spanish. These are the most beautiful types of " lustre " pottery that are known, and they are the ones dealt with in Lady Evane's book and your review. Mr. Moorcroft's new statement that "the truer, the more durable, and beautiful lustres are applied on the biscuit, and are all underglaze and fired at a temperature often double that referred to in the review," is not borne out by the facts, for we have ample information from contemporary sources of the methods that were followed. He is apparently confounding the "lustre" effect with that of the Chinese and other flambd glazes, which are not "lustres" in any sense of the word. The "intense relativity" which distinguishes the Chinese from the modern Podia glazes is evidently too much for Mr. Moorcroft to grasp!
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