Homes & Antiques

The mystery COLLECTOR

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To my regret, I never got to meet Murray Pollinger in person. Yet I consider myself fortunate that my life has been enriched by him in recent years. It all started when I first tried to find out more about early 19th-century porcelain by Samuel Alcock. I kept coming across it, but could find no documentation and I noticed that many pieces were misidentified. The pattern numbers made no sense and virtually nothing was marked.

Where to begin? I asked around, and I heard on the grapevine about a gentleman in Norfolk with a large, meticulously researched collection. Rumour had it there was no plan to publish his work. Keen to meet him, I tried in vain to discover his name, before abandoning my search in late 2022. Merely three weeks later, I received a phone

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