William De Morgan was the most exciting and innovative potter of his day. He is best remembered for his animal and floral designs and glittering lustreware.

Born in 1839 in London, De Morgan grew up with 6 siblings. He went to school University College School where his father taught mathematics.

In 1859, he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools. During this formal art education he drew from life, classical sculpture and learned perspective and ratio. He made friends with artists such as Simeon Soloman and Henry Holiday. His small stature and high-pitched voice earned him the nick-name 'mouse'.

He met arts and crafts designer William Morris in 1863 and began working with him on stained glass. He noticed that silver nitrate stain fired at the wrong temperature would reduce to give an iridescent sheen on the glass. Reminded of the lost ancient art of lustre ceramics, he began experimenting. For the next forty years he tried to perfect lustre ceramics.

It didn't start too well. A fire blazed through his home when a makeshift kiln went wrong.

He began making ceramics in earnest in 1872 in Chelsea. He bought blank tiles and small plates to decorate with ceramic designs. A typical Arts and Crafts home business, he employed local women such as Charlotte Babb and Nellie Mossop, to paint tiles.

He moved to Merton Abbey near Wimbledon to have a larger pottery in 1882. William Morris had premises nearby and the two had previously joked about moving their businesses to the country. Not quite believing they ever would, they called their factories 'the fictionary'. Finally, he had space to make his own pots. Snakes wrap around pot handles and fish swim in bowls in Merton ceramics. He remained very interested in the process and technique of glazing and designed and made his own kilns.

William's staff would decorate the ceramics to his exact designs and had ingenious methods of transfer. For individual tiles and tile panels, staff would trace the design and paint the glazes on tracing paper. This would burn in the heat of the kilns and reveal the design. Take a closer look at the tiles. Can you see lines where the paper has folded? Staff would also use 'pouncing' where they would prick holes along the lines of the designs and rub charcoal through to the ceramic surface. Joining the dots revealed the design.

William won several important commissions over his career. He installed Lord Leighton's collection of Persian tiles in the newly built Arab Hall of his Holland Park home (today, Leighton House Museum). This introduced him to Syrian and Iranian tiles and Middle Eastern and Islamic tiles and design motifs. He borrowed them in his own designs.

Between 1882 and 1900, William was asked to design schemes and provide tiles for twelve P&O liners. Letters between De Morgan and his business partner Halsey Ricardo show its importance. “We want to get into the big ships as well as these second class cargo boats – the Chairman has yet to be convinced that the tiles are good enough for these". The designs are both decorative schemes and picture panels that feature landscapes of places the ships visit. Sadly, no ships survive today.

A smaller, but very interesting commission was lustre tiles for his friend Lewis Carroll. The Snark and other nonsense poetry inspired De Morgan's cheeky and fantasy animals.

In the end, the eight-mile journey from home in Chelsea to Merton Abbey proved too much for De Morgan. He moved his business to Sands End in Fulham in 1888 and stayed there until it folded in 1907. De Morgan perfected his lustre glazes during this time and spoke about his reinvention of the lost art to the Egyptian Government in 1893.

There are two main reasons for the eventual closure of the pottery business. De Morgan had little interest in running a business and was much more concerned with inventing and designing. When asked, by his business manager Reginald Blunt, how his pots should be priced for sale, De Morgan wrote teasingly in his reply;

“re price of pots ... I know there is some way of doing it thus: multiply the height in inches by the largest diameter in centimetres and divide by the number of hours employed. Multiply this result by the logarithm of the number of shillings per week wages, and it will give the price of the pot in half pence." This of course is utter nonsense and shows William's ability to make fun of himself.

Additionally, De Morgan designs had become outdated by the turn of the century. He had focused his practice on the reinvention of lusterware and failed to update his patterns and motifs. In his words “All my life I have been trying to make beautiful things...and now that I can nobody wants them." His last major commission was tiles for Postman's Park, a memorial to ordinary heroes in central London, which was paid for and set up by G F Watts.

At the closure of the business, De Morgan began suffering with depression. On the advice of his doctor and his wife, he started writing novels which seemed to ease his symptoms. He published Joseph Vance, his first novel of seven, in 1906 and went on to become a best-selling author. De Morgan was socially conscious and became the vice-president of the Men's League of Women's Suffrage in 1913.