ANTHONY GEORGE RAY, who died on 7th August 2009, was born in Darjeeling, India, in 1926. His father, Reginald Ray, had a distinguished career as Commissioner of Police in Bengal. His mother, Marion Huggan, was the talented daughter of the mayor of Pudsey in Leeds. Ray inherited his linguistic abilities from both parents but it was to his mother, who died when he was ten, that he owed both his musical gifts and his dynamism. He was sent to school in England with his two elder siblings and was brought up by English relatives in what was not, by all accounts, an easy childhood. After Charterhouse where, during Robert Birley’s headmastership, he was head boy, Ray briefly served in the Navy in the last months of the Second World War before going up in 1945 to University College, Oxford, to read Modern Languages. It was there that he discovered the superb ceramic collections of the Ashmolean Museum, which were to stimulate his love as a collector and as a scholar of English and Continental tiles and ceramics. In 1951 Birley, then headmaster of Eton, invited Ray to join the school as a teacher of modern languages. It was the beginning of a long and distinguished career as a teacher and housemaster, for Ray was an educator in the broadest sense. The memorial service for him at Eton in November 2009 commemorated his unique contribution to Eton life and his influence over thirty-seven years, until his retirement in 1988. Eton gave Ray much in return, particularly in his friendly, admiring, but somewhat competitive relationship with Oliver van Oss, himself a keen collector and distinguished authority on English Delft. It also brought him into contact with the ceramic artist Gordon Baldwin, of whom he wrote a perceptive appreciation for the English Ceramics Circle in 2006. Ray and his wife, the art teacher Veronica Slater whom he married in 1956, owned one of the largest private collections of Baldwin’s work, some of which will be shown in the major retrospective of the artist’s work at the Barrett Marsden Gallery in London later this year. Despite the demands of his Eton career, Ray became a leading ceramics specialist, first in English Delftware and later in Spanish and Italian ceramics. This grew out of his passion for collecting, and his indefatigable spirit. He thought nothing of driving from Eton to Burford on a Friday evening to buy tiles from the dealer Roger Warner, who became a close friend. He had a Portobello instinct as a collector, squirrelling his latest purchases on visits to London into his capacious and rather scruffy coat which, his family remember, would often crackle on his return home. One of his rarest finds was a Tuscan albarello of around 1440, with decoration in relief in green rather than the more usual blue. He spotted this in an antique shop one Sunday and got a special dispensation from Birley to be let off teaching the following morning in order to secure the pot, which has since been on long-term loan to the Ashmolean Museum. He never forgot the encouragement he had received at that museum from Ian Robertson and Karl Parker, and his loyalty to both Oxford and the Ashmolean became a strong element in his life. He published English Delftware in the Robert Hall Warren Collection in the Ashmolean Museum in 1968, and two further books, English Delftware Tiles (1973) and Liverpool Printed Tiles (1994), and, finally, a book on English Delftware in the Ashmolean in 2000. It was with the people, language and culture of Spain that Ray had a special affinity and, after his retirement from Eton in 1988, he largely dedicated his energies to the study of Spanish ceramics. This resulted in his greatest achievement, Spanish Pottery 1248–1948 with a catalogue of the collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum (2000). This established him as probably the leading scholar in the world in one of the most demanding areas of the history of the applied arts. The tin-glazed lustred pottery first made by Muslim potters in Spain and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by potters, mainly of Muslim faith or descent in the Christian kingdom of Valencia, constitutes one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of world ceramics. It introduced Europe to the concept of pottery as a luxury art form. Despite this, it has never received the attention it deserves, in comparison with that traditionally given to Italian maiolica. Ray brought to the V. & A. catalogue his critical assessment of all the archival, archaeo­logical and historical evidence, as well as his knowledge of collections around the world. He worked from first principles and always made this clear when a specific attribution could not be made on the basis of current knowledge. The result was, in Timothy Wilson’s words, ‘the most reliable, thorough, comprehensive, wide-ranging and important work on Spanish pottery’ produced to date in any language. It is a measure of Ray’s achievement that the only comparable volume is Summa Artis: Ceramica Española (Madrid 1997), a collective work by eleven Spanish specialists. Looking at Spanish lustred ceramics with Ray was always enlightening, as he had a visual classification for everything he saw, which gave an extra degree of intensity to his looking. When he handled a pot or tile it was immediately evident that he not only knew how it was made, decorated and fired, but that he had an intuitive understanding of the Spanish craft tradition, particularly in its Moorish inheritance. This was demonstrated in a short but incisive article he wrote for this Magazine in 2000, ‘The Rothschild “Alfabeguer” and Other Fifteenth-Century Lustred Basil-Pots’. There he described a form of basil-pot evolved from Moorish potters, named Alfabeguer in Valencian from al-‘habac, the Arabic for sweet basil. The fifteenth-century type made in Manises shared an ingenious construction, with turrets containing apertures which allowed the basil plants to be watered. Anthony’s study of sherds and the few surviving examples indicated that they were luxury pots of the finest and most expensive variety, commissioned by leading families in Spain and beyond. Ray also published in this Magazine on the ceramics of sixteenth-century Castile (1990) and of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Seville (1987 and 1990). In the early 1990s he turned his attention to the study of the Italian potter Francisco Niculoso Pisano, who settled in Seville in the late fifteenth century, bringing the pictorial Italian maiolica tradition to Spain. Niculoso invented the tile picture, a new form of architectural ceramic incorporating the latest Renaissance designs and ornament. Ray published on Niculoso in Italian Renaissance Pottery, edited by his friend Timothy Wilson in 1991, and some years before his death started on a monograph to be written with another friend, Alfonso Pleguezuelo of Seville. It is to be hoped that this book will be published in his memory, since it promises to be the definitive study of this problematic and mysterious figure in the diffusion of the Italian maiolica tradition beyond Italy. Ray is widely and affectionately remembered for his scholarly generosity, his musical intelligence and the warmth of his friendship. His was always a highly civilised presence, even in the most unpromising surroundings. The quality of his talk, his responsiveness and charm remained undiminished by age or illness. His work was recognised in Spain by his election to the Academia di Toledo, and in Britain through his election to the Society of Antiquaries in 1995, and the award of a DLitt by Oxford University in 2002. It was his intention to leave to the Ashmolean what is by far the most important collection of English tiles in private hands, along with his collecting archive and his specialist library on Spanish and Italian ceramics. Timothy Wilson recently put on display in the Ashmolean’s Warren Room some of Ray’s donations of ceramics to the Museum in tribute to his memory. DORA THORNTON