Delhi Blue Art Pottery Curio - Vase. An elegant artifact that adds a touch of class wherever it may be placed. Delhi Blue Pottery was a vivid blue art pottery that gradually evolved in the country over the last century, promoted largely by a veteran and pioneer of art pottery in India, Sardar Gurcharan Singh, born in 1896 in Srinagar. Unlike commercial pottery, in art pottery, each piece is of a different shape, as individual as a painting. As the driving force behind the emergence of Delhi Blue Pottery, Sardar Gurcharan Singh went on to become the founder of the Delhi Blue Pottery Trust and held several senior Government positions in the field of pottery and ceramics in Punjab and Lahore. A Padma Shree awardee for his contribution in the field of ceramics, he started life with a BSc. degree with Honours in Geology in 1918, when life occurrences introduced him to the world of pottery as he started work at an early age with his father’s friend, Sardar Ram Singh Kabli in Delhi who owned Delhi Pottery Works, a small pottery unit at that time. He met Abdullah Mussalman who worked at the brick kiln and was a descendant of Pathan potters who had come to India in the 13th century, from whom he learned the secret of the blue glaze. Together the Sikh potter who had refined his art in Japan and Korea and the old Pathan craftsman evolved a new idiom of aesthetic that became the signature of what Gurcharan Singh named Delhi Blue Art Pottery, after the famous Delhi Blue Glaze he so admired. This stoneware clay was fired to a high temperature in coal furnaces. All the glazes were prepared from raw materials and ground by hand. Extraordinarily beautiful results were achieved by adroit dipping and pouring as he enhanced the cool stoneware with subtle and beautiful shades. Around the 1970s, Gurcharan Singh's practice shifted from glazed surfaces to rough textures that he preferred to glazed pottery. The beauty of the Delhi Blue Art Pottery piece featured here is an outcome of this amazing craft story.