Warren Tippett was apprenticed as a signwriter in 1956, and the hand shows. His name is brushed in iron across the foot of each of these, quick and unhesitating, the year set under it. By 1962 he was at Yvonne Rust's Studio of Design in Christchurch, and in 1963, the year on these mugs, he exhibited in the city for the first time. What he was making then was orthodox Anglo-Oriental stoneware, tenmoku over a pale body, the idiom that dominated New Zealand pottery until the 1980s and that every serious potter of the period worked inside.

Two decades later he took that orthodoxy apart, firing low and glazing bright in colour that read as Pacific rather than Japanese, and he is now credited with changing what New Zealand ceramics were allowed to be. These come from before the break. Four mugs from the year he started showing, made in the tradition he would spend the rest of his life dismantling.