San Francisco Ceramic Circle

Illustrated Lecture

"In Praise of Passion, Perseverence and Purpose: the Harriet Carlton Goldweitz Collection of English Pottery"

by

Letitia Roberts

"Independent Scholar and Researcher, formerly Sr. V.P. European & Chinese Export Ceramics, Sothebys, New York"

8.00 PM Thursday, 16th August 2007

The Constance and Henry Bowles Porcelain Gallery

Palace of the Legion of Honor. Lincoln Park, San Francisco

Enter from the West Terrace. Doors open from 7.30 PM

About the speaker: In 1968 Letitia Roberts joined the auction firm of Sotheby Parke Bernet (Sotheby's) in New York after brief excursions into academic administration and banking. She worked in the Old Master Paintings, Appraisals, and American Furniture and Decorative Arts Departments prior to joining the European Ceramics & Chinese Export Porcelain Department in 1973. She became its director in 1978, was appointed Senior Vice President of Sotheby's in 1981, and in 1998 was named Senior International Specialist. While at Sotheby's Ms Roberts was involved with many of the major pottery and porcelain collections sold in America, including the Garbisch, Mottahedeh and Van Slyke collections and those of Henry Ford II and Nelson A. Rockefeller. Since 2002, Ms Roberts has been working as an independent scholar, author, lecturer, adjunct professor, collections advisor and occasional appraiser. She is currently collaborating on the catalog of the Stout Collection of Continental Porcelain at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, which should be published in 2008.

She is a member of numerous ceramics societies, ( including the SFCC ), and serves on the boards of the American Ceramic Circle, the Wedgwood Society of New York, of which she is the Recording Secretary, and the French Porcelain Society, of which she is the Secretary-Treasurer in North America.

About the Lecture : By anyone's definition, Harriet Carlton Goldweitz was for nearly thirty years the "collector's collector," assembling a collection of 16th- to 19th-Century English pottery of such quality and rarity, that when it was offered for sale at Sotheby's in New York on January 20, 2006, the ceramics world was transfixed and silently wondered whether there would actually be enough collectors of similar discernment to understand and absorb the Goldweitz treasures. This talk is the story of the Goldweitz Collection -- a distillation of Harriet's own frequently presented lecture entitled, "Passion, Perseverance and Purpose: Secrets of One Collector's Methodology," but now with a view from both the inside out and the outside in. It is the story of a tiny woman from the Boston suburb of Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, whose intellectual curiosity and fascination with the interaction of taste, technology and Anglo-American history propelled her singular determination to form a collection that not only "illustrated the development of the potter's art," but that revealed and enhanced knowledge and understanding of the material culture of England and Colonial America from the 'Age of Reason' through the 'Age of Enlightenment.' The talk follows the threads of Harriet's well-reasoned and thoroughly enlightened collecting pursuits through museums, private collections and libraries, behind lecture podiums and at both the front and back of the London and New York salerooms.

Next event: Sunday 14th October 2007. Appraising Pottery and Porcelains - Observations from the Podium by Stuart Slavid