Antique Clarice Cliff
Hand-painted earthenware made under the Clarice Cliff name in the Art Deco years: bright domestic tableware, mostly small preserve and sugar wares and tea or coffee services, with a few pieces made to hang or stand on display.
Antique Clarice Cliff
Hand-painted earthenware, sold under trade range names applied to standard shapes, and made as affordable decorative tableware for ordinary households rather than as fine porcelain. Listings identify pieces by trade name and pattern name first, so a title tends to read as maker, then range, then pattern, then object.
Small table wares dominate. Of 17 listings on Sellingantiques, sugar, honey and preserve pieces account for five, with a conical sugar sifter beside them, and tea, coffee and part services account for five more. Ornamental pieces are the minority: a pair of shell wall pockets, a wall charger, a My Garden figural candle holder and a Toby jug.
Range names carry a lot of the identity. Bizarre appears in four titles, Fantasque in two, Delicia and My Garden once each, so roughly half of what comes up names a range on top of the maker. Named patterns turn up on eight or nine of the seventeen: Corolla, Crocus, Solomon's Seal, Oranges and Autumn, Pastel Melon, Delicia Pansies, Gayday.
The dating is unusually tight. Fourteen listings say 1930s, two say 1920s and one gives only Art Deco with no year, so the whole run sits inside a single decade. The 1920 entries are round-number datings on two services rather than close attributions.
What Sets Them Apart
Completeness decides the top of the range. The two highest listings are a Fantasque Autumn coffee set and a Gayday tea for two, both whole services, while a part service and a single teapot sit in the middle. Single small table items hold the bottom: a Toby jug, a Corolla sugar bowl, a preserve pot.
Naming does real work too. Titles that give both a range and a pattern, such as a Fantasque Pastel Melon sifter or a Bizarre Oranges Autumn sugar bowl, sit above the plainer entries that offer only the maker and the object. Shape terms follow the same pattern, with conical, square-shaped and Bonjour appearing on the dearer pieces.
Only one title in the archive states outright that the piece is hand painted, and it sits among the highest-priced. Everything here was decorated by hand, so what is being priced is not the technique but how fully the piece has been placed and described.
Antique Clarice Cliff Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for clarice cliff, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
One-offs from the archive include a pair of shell wall pockets, a Toby jug, and a figural lady candle holder holding her flowers aloft.
Clarice Cliff
The Antique Clarice Cliff Glossary
- Bizarre
- A trade range name painted on the ware, and the one most often named here, in four titles.
- Fantasque
- A second range name, on two of the pieces in the archive, and sometimes seen alongside Bizarre.
- Pattern name
- The painted design's own name, usually the first thing given after the maker. Corolla, Crocus, Gayday, Solomon's Seal, Oranges and Autumn, and Pastel Melon all appear.
- Sugar sifter
- A lidded caster for sugar. The one in the archive is described as conical, meaning the straight-sided tapering form.
- Wall pocket
- A flat-backed vessel hung on the wall to hold flowers. One pair turns up, in a shell shape.
- Bonjour
- A shape name, attached here to one of the preserve pots.
Antique Clarice Cliff: Frequently Asked Questions
How often do these come up for sale?
Around two a year reach the market on Sellingantiques, so the category moves slowly.
Fifteen different dealers have listed one, which tells you almost nobody carries them repeatedly. They arrive singly, from a wide spread of sellers.
What sort of pieces turn up most?
Small table and preserve wares. Sugar bowls, honey and preserve pots and a sugar sifter account for about a third of the listings.
Tea and coffee services, whole or in part, take up another third. That leaves four ornamental pieces across the whole run.
Which ranges and patterns appear?
Bizarre is named in four titles, Fantasque in two, with Delicia and My Garden once each.
On patterns, Corolla, Crocus, Solomon's Seal, Oranges and Autumn, Pastel Melon, Delicia Pansies and Gayday each appear once or twice. No single pattern dominates.
Are large vases and figures part of this category?
Not in what has passed through Sellingantiques. The unusual forms are all one-offs: a pair of shell wall pockets, a wall charger, a figural lady candle holder in the My Garden range and a Toby jug.
Everything else is table ware.
Why is everything dated to the same decade?
The dealers' own dating is uniform. Fourteen of the 17 listings say 1930s, two say 1920s and one gives only Art Deco.
Sixteen carry a clean year, and every one of those falls between 1920 and 1930.
Do complete sets sit above single pieces?
Yes. A Fantasque Autumn coffee set and a Gayday tea for two are the two highest listings in the archive.
A part service and a lone teapot sit in the middle, and single small preserve and sugar wares hold the bottom of the range.