Ian Sprague

Ian Broun Sprague (1920–1994) was an Australian twentieth-century

his fifties as a sculptor in two- and three-dimensional pottery; his sixties and seventies making landscape works on paper.

Early life

Sprague was born in

Sprague was 6 ft. 1 in. tall with fair hair and blue eyes.[7] He appeared at Government House parties^[11] and as best man at fashionable weddings,^[12][13] but he never married. On a driving holiday in Scotland in 1957, he had a car accident that put him in hospital for five months. One knee was permanently damaged and a frequent source of pain. His surgeon suggested he restore the strength of his arms by taking up a craft.^[14]

Pottery

Sprague attended the London

, Victoria.

I had this whole setup clearly in mind. I wanted to live out of Melbourne. I wanted to have animals, some land, and to be completely free to do what I wanted.^[15]

On the estate he set up a pottery,

) language.

… we finally arrived at a stoneware body mixing a local fireclay with commercial red clay, china clay and ball clay … it works well and reduces to a red-brown with lighter speckling … Most of the glazes we use are, as a result, in the darker earthy colours but speckled light greys and ochres are also possible.^[18]

The Mungeribar Pottery's mark is a Macdonald's em impressed; Sprague's personal mark is a capital I over a horizontal separator and the Morse code for S—three dots. Some pots are signed "IanS".^[20] Drawings and paintings are signed "Ian Sprague"; work signed simply "Sprague" is generally by his nephew Leslie.

Sprague had met and liked the potter and

Sprague produced a full range of functional domestic pottery from 1964 to 1980.

In 1964 he established the Craft Centre in South Yarra, "a display centre and exhibition gallery for Australia's highest standard craft work".[21] Sprague thus had control of every step of production from mixing the clay to passing wrapped pots over the counter. The Centre was owned and stocked entirely by him, and he travelled all over Australia in search of the best pottery, textiles, glassware, woodwork and jewellery. The opening exhibition showed the pottery of Robin Welch.^[16] Sprague sold the Centre in 1967,^[10] but soon started a campaign for a government funded centre, eventually established as the Meat Market Craft Centre in North Melbourne. In 1971 Sprague became president of the recently established Craft Association of Victoria.^[22] Dismayed by the quality of teaching in art schools and technical colleges, he ran many workshops around the country on the textural treatment of clay.^[19][23]

I feel that one should contribute something for the common good, although often a tremendous amount of one's creative work-time is used … Establishing and running a property, collecting paintings by Australian artists, pop and classical records and continually entertaining friends and visitors has not left me enough time for my own work.^[10]

Functional pottery

On one view, Sprague never produced great quantities of work himself; he was a self-effacing craftsman, not inclined to promote or exhibit his work.^[14] Yet he fired about 1,500 domestic pots of his own each year^[24] and scores of them are now in public collections.^[25]

The brown stonewares, the nicely formed functional breadcrocks, teapots, fruit platters and teacups and saucers … made his a household name among the 1970s cognoscenti.^[26]

Victor Greenaway was his apprentice 1969–73. (Greenaway's mark in his Mungeribar years was an impressed capital G.)^[27] Greenaway eventually became Sprague's friend and occasional manager.^[28] He considered Sprague

a gentleman potter … exceptionally skilled at his craft … For Welch, the greatest pleasure was to see shelves full of multiples of his own work but for Sprague, his objective was to place the hand-made piece of pottery in the house — making cups and saucers and beautiful objects to use and feel and generally appreciate.^[14]

In 1973 Sprague excised two acres of Mungeribar to provide Greenaway with land for a house of his own. The other apprentices at Mungeribar were Grattan Burley (for six months),^[19] Christopher Sanders (1976–78),^[20] who became a lifelong friend, and Trevor Hanby (1978–80). After 14 years of hands-on pottery making, Sprague ceded to Hanby the job of developing a full range of pots to be sold under the Mungeribar mark.^[29]

In 1965 the famous Japanese potter

Non-functional pottery

In the mid-1970s Sprague, following Robin Welch, produced a series of sculptures by adding anthropomorphic features to spindly thrown pots. Bearing such names as Critic, Totem and Warrior, they look like excavated chthonic mannikins.^[32]

Ovoid forms originated on the wheel but were beaten and scraped into expressive asymmetry and ornamented with clay disks and straps. A large group of these was shown at Leveson Street Gallery, North Melbourne, in December 1980.^[33]

From 1973 at the latest he specialised in

Later examples have a spine of coloured glass in clay wells.

Sprague produced his wall panels by cutting them from fireclay blocks, heating and scraping them, and applying bold simplified motifs. These rugged clay surfaces were often finished simply by pouring a strong solution of salted water on to their surfaces … [firing] resulting in a warm toasted surface effect.[35]

The hand-modelled clay panels … combine expressive abstract forms and a rare understanding of the modulation of two dimensional relief sculpture.^[26]

Generally the panels were in groups of three, but installations of 8 panels (two by four), 42 (seven by six) or 27 (three by nine) were made, notably for the

Single panels were sometimes glazed bas-relief sculptures.

Sprague laid out a design of 20,000 ceramic tiles in the Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne, in 1979 to form a "people's pathway".

Later life

By 1981 Mungeribar was too onerous and too cold for Sprague's health. He sold the Upper Beaconsfield estate and moved to a house and studio he had bought at

Reputation

Ian Sprague: studio potter 1920–1994, a retrospective exhibition curated by Relton Leaver, was held at the Victorian State Craft Collection Gallery in 1995.[41] The review in The Age, headed "Master potter hailed", wrote of his "legendary contribution to contemporary ceramics".^[26] Examples of Sprague's work are held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria; the Victorian Ceramic Group; the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; the Ian Potter Museum of Art.

Photos

A photo of Sprague by Mark Strizic in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria is available online as Ian B. Sprague (1960s). It provides a rare glimpse of him working on a ceramic sculpture.

A photo by Kraig Carlstrom in Nine Artist Potters shows Sprague at Mungeribar in the late 1970s wearing a zippered turtleneck jumper over blue denim flares.^[42]

Gallery

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

Marananga, Barossa Valley , 1992; 27cm x 35cm; unsigned and undated.

References