While Thorley’s father had been a successful painter in Staffordshire’s potteries, future prospects for highly-skilled ceramic painters looked dim in the early twentieth-century. In fact, John Thorley initially disapproved of Palin’s apprenticeship at Wedgwood. Having given up pottery work himself in favor of painting on canvas, the elder Thorley hoped that his son would be an architect instead. It was Palin’s mother, who also came from a potting family, who convinced them both that pottery was “in the blood.” At Wedgwood Palin was taught to add hand-painted decoration to plates and jars like the signed examples seen here. He also learned to design and make pottery on the potting wheel and using molds.

Listen to Palin Thorley talk about his childhood in art school and the first pottery he ever made, which he copied from eighteenth-century slipware dishes by English potter Thomas Toft much like the historic example seen here.