Little accurate information has been published on the subject, though the tradition of lustreware can be dated back to the 9th century.

The decorative models continuously renovate themselves through the creation of new techniques and formulas for pigments and third Lustreware and third firings are not merely coverings, but offer a three-dimensional vision of the work.

The output of general products from the Swansea and Llanelly factories was huge, and yet the amount of lustreware they produced is absolutely minimal.

Also new to Wedgwood are Lustreware, Platinum Plume, Parade and Proposal.

Michael Gibson's recent book called 19th Century Lustreware (Antique Collectors' Club: pounds 35) is a splendid introduction to lustre pottery, highly collectable these days with its myriad colours and shapes.

His talent for design and experimental techniques, including the revival of metal-glazed lustreware, ultimately contributed to his position as the most celebrated ceramics designer of his generation.

WHEN LOOKING AT RAYA STERN'S BEAUTIFUL TABLEWARE AND slender long-necked bottles, one admires her deep understanding of the technology of lustreware, the flowing application of it on her perfect elegantly thrown pots.

"Moroccan is chic -- monkeys, palm trees and bamboo, and lustreware looks -- it's got so many elements."

The signature Jansen aesthetic--what could be described as French 18th-century grandeur melded with Hollywood theatrics and English country house eclecticism--is evident in the room's beautifully distressed panelled woodwork and the white upholstery and white walls, offset by ornate ironwork light fittings and his mother's collection of Hispano-Moresque lustreware.

Caiger Smith, who closed his Aldermaston studios only recently, has been acknowledged as a world authority on the art of reduced lustreware and admired widely for the quality of his brushwork decoration.

Earning 5 [pounds sterling] a week in London, he was not in a position to buy anything, but when he got his first job in Paris he began acquiring medieval Islamic pottery--'the only thing I could afford at the time, and it had extraordinary patterns.' The group was subsequently sold but he retained a solitary, and rather poignant, example--a lustreware plate decorated with a cross evidently made at Raqqa in Syria for a Christian family.

The artists used two or more colours (that is, polychrome) to decorate early lustreware with small geometric and plant designs that produced a sparkling effect like precious metalwork.

Next we retreat into a room filled with Hispano-Moresque lustreware plates.

1), the 'Persian' lustreware of William de Morgan and the metalwork of William Benson.

(6) Still more successful was a range of maiolica decorated mainly in blue in more or less orientalising styles, sometimes directly imitating imported Valencian lustreware. Some close (though unlustred) copies of Valencian wares, in the so-called 'bryony pattern' (known to a late 15th-century Pisan owner as 'fleur-de-lis' pattern), (7) are dated by Berti around 1500, later than has previously been supposed; if this is right, it is curious that pieces like Figure 2 should have been in flourishing production some 30 years after the Valencian makers of the prestigious and expensive lustred prototypes had begun to replace 'bryony' with 'ivy-leaf' pattern.