The Kettle's Yard exhibition underlines the significant role that Jewish ceramicists such as Lucie Rie and her close friend and collaborator, Hans Coper, played in transforming British studio ceramics, and in influencing successive generations of ceramic artists working today. They imported European modernist ideals that challenged the dominance of Bernard Leach and the darker, heavier, earthenware English tradition. Even when making functional pieces such as these 1950s 'squeezed' bowls, Lucie Rie's style was simple, elegant, and very fine.

Despite earning international recognition before fleeing Vienna, Lucie Rie was initially refused a licence to make pottery in England. Instead, she made a living during the war by creating beautiful, sought-after ceramic buttons for high-end fashion houses. These were overlooked for many years until Issey Miyake discovered and used them in the late 1980s. They also provided her with invaluable opportunities to experiment with glazes and shapes before returning to studio pottery in the late 1940s.    

The marvellous Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery has just opened at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, and will continue to the Holburne in Bath in July. Born in Vienna to prosperous Jewish family, Lucie Rie (1902-95) studied at the prestigious Kunstwerbeschule and established her name internationally as a maker of elegant modernist pottery before coming to London in 1938 as a refugee. She set up studio and home in 18 Albion Mews (above) where she worked and lived in exile for the rest of her life. 

David Gentleman (b.1930), illustrator of Plats du Jour, has been drawing London for decades. For his book London, You're Beautiful (2012) he spent a year 'immersing himself in the metropolis'. The Olympic Park provided inspiration; the cranes and unfinished ArcelorMittal Orbit look like huge, lively, dancing snakes and ladders. 

Gwen Raverat (1885-1957) illustrated The Runaway with sixty of her delightful wood engravings. She also wrote and illustrated the classic Period Piece (1952), an affectionate, child's-eye account of growing up in Cambridge in the late C19 amidst the extended Darwin-Wedgwood family (she was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin). These are the 'heroic survivors of the picnic': two each of her characterful aunts and uncles plus her mother. 'Aunt Ida alone still has a gallant smile glued to her lips; the others are just enduring'. 

The multi-talented Edward Bawden (1903-89), illustrator of Good Food on the Aga, worked extensively on advertising materials for Fortnum & Mason. The Mainstone Press, publisher of a book on this partnership, describes it as "an unlikely double act: one a firm devoted to luxury provisions and lavish entertaining, the other a shy, retiring artist, who once proposed to offer charcoal biscuits and water to guests at a ‘gloom party".  Yet it inspired some of his best, most vivid and fanciful illustrations.

Evelyn Dunbar (1906-60) worked on Gardener's Choice with Charles Mahoney. When we published it we wrote, "the main delight of the book is the drawings – black and white illustrations that have never been reproduced since their first publication in 1937". Like many illustrators, she drew all the time; the correspondence between the two was enlivened by Evelyn's delightful illustrations, as above. For more about her life and work, do look at Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country (2006) by Gill Clarke.