Leach Janet

Janet Leach worked with Bernard at the Leach Pottery and, as well as making her own pots, she became his business manager. She was Bernard Leach’s third wife, they were married in 1956. 

Janet trained as a sculptor in New York and then studied ceramics at the Inwood Pottery and Alfred University. She set up her first pottery at Threefold Farm, 25 miles north of New York, in 1947. She first met Bernard Leach, Hamada Shoji and Soetsu Yanagi when they toured America in 1952, and studied with Hamada in Japan for two years, as well as travelling widely in the country visiting folk craft potteries.

Her style was very different from Bernard’s and it was very much influenced by the work of Japanese Bizen potters, as well as inspired by the stones, textures and granite walls of Cornwall. Interestingly, she never mixed her sculpture with her pottery believing “each has its own standard”.