I first met Galli when I was 24 on a buying trip with my father in his big Jaguar. The year was 1959 and Galli must have been about 48 years old. His studio was in a large farmhouse in the middle of agricultural countryside in the verdant province of Brianza, some 10 miles from Monza, famous for its race track, and 25 miles from Milan. He ran a sort of school inside the farmhouse teaching children the art of porcelain manufacture. There were some 30 pupils and it was explained that he qualified for tax free status by having the factory double up as an academy for the arts. The impression one formed on entering the work place was that of organised chaos. Mrs Galli was continuously shouting at the dog and puppies to clear out of her way, she shouted at Galli the Maestro for his lack of etiquette, she shouted at the kids for falling asleep at their tables and everybody shouted back in country Milanese dialect which, despite my years of study at Cambridge, remained a mystery.

Animals roamed around the factory floor and yard, Maria Galli’s father, who was ancient, small, but enormously strong, hacked away at rough timber to make packing cases, while her mother was engaged in feeding the staff, feeding the chickens and generally bustling about with a witches type broom. Amidst this crucible of activity they were producing wonderful masterpieces in fine porcelain. Galli had several sculptures on the go simultaneously. In his earlier works he was strongly influenced by Disney and was enchanted by the characters like Snow White and the seven dwarfs. By the time I visited the factory/academy he had moved on from using gres-d’arte, a rather soft paste ceramic material, to firing fine porcelain, enabling him to create finer models in the sense of extra detail and definition. He was still drawn to the heroic. Pirates, fishermen, gladiators and geniis from the Arabian Nights populate his studies.

At the time my company, Febland Group Ltd, was buying very modest amounts of stock from Galli. We mainly sold a range of urchins with raggy clothes or musical instruments and they would cost us around £3.00 apiece. They went like wildfire to the trade but we could never get enough. Despite placing large forward orders Galli was always behind in delivery. I used to visit him twice a year at his factory in Aicurzio, then a lone building with hardly a neighbour in sight but now the area is built up into a huge suburban sprawl. On one of my visits I believe I discovered why Galli could not execute our full orders. It seems that Mrs Galli was keen on cash on the nail transactions and especially drawn to gold coins from buyers who came in small vans from France, Belgium, Germany, etc. These esteemed cash buyers would gobble up stock intended for us but curiously in Italy it seemed that if you did not provide any paperwork to your client you could declare a poor financial result at the end of the year and avoid taxes or, more likely, bribes to be forked out to discourage the scrutiny of the fiscal officers. I don’t think Galli, artist as he was, paid much attention to making money himself. He dressed like a peasant, his hair unkempt, white shirt torn, trousers fastened with an old leather belt, his trousers had various patches and his shoes encrusted with ceramic powder. He was tall and skinny but very wiry with long pianists’ fingers and he would frequently burst out into song, the words incomprehensible but no doubt the Brianzola equivalent of a serenade along Neapolitan lines. He knew no English but made a brave attempt at ‘Waltzing Matilda’ for some reason which I never discovered. On my autumn visit in 1965 I was honoured with a glimpse of Galli’s one luxury which he had permitted himself.

He had learned that two of the great porcelain artists: Cappé and Tagliaruol (Tay) had acquired magnificent racing cars, Cappé had a Lamborghini with which to cruise around Monza city and Tay had bought a red Ferrari to snort around the Autodromo. Unable to resist Galli bought a bright yellow Bizzarini and the whole neighbourhood was scared to death. A year later on my visit to Galli I innocently made an inquiry after the Bizzarini. Silence fell for many minutes before he revealed that he had turned it over into a ditch on one of the narrow corners bordering the area. It was no more. Galli never was at peace with machinery, everything in the porcelain trade was done by hand, the modelling, the collagio or fastening together the parts with slip clay, the painting, the stacking of the furnaces, the assembly of the heavy moulds and most of all the sculpture of original pieces are all done by hand. Putting a fierce sports car into Galli’s hands is tempting fate to the extreme and a large stone was metaphorically placed over the memory of the Bizzarini. It was no more.

Galli’s inspirations were manifold. He loved humour – the shipwrecked sailor who holds a mermaid but begins to fry her tail in the frying pan, Mylord who owns a magnificent jalopy but it has broken down and is being pushed by the locals, the Judge who is giving a verdict in favour of a sexy young wife against her poor downtrodden husband, the Doctor with his hypodermic needle on top of a very comely female patient, the Husband on holiday trying to peer through a torn umbrella at a bikini clad sylph while his rotund missus is keeping an eagle eye on him. The examples are many and magnificent. He always saw the ironic side of life in his works. He was married to a short but energetic and tubby little lady of peasant stock who controlled his life. They had no children but managed to live a unique life style in this farmhouse where neighbours would bring them demi-johns of virgin olive oil or sides of bresaola from a wild boar or bottles of home made wine or slabs of taleggio or fontina cheese. They worked like mad and in a funny way enjoyed themselves by laughing at their own shortcomings. They had so many models and each model is made up of scores of parts that often they got lost or mis-placed upstairs in the barn so that Galli, rather than driving himself wild looking for the missing parts, would create another figure afresh. This would cause Maria Galli to burst into tears of laughter at her husband’s behaviour. I now wonder if she had hidden the missing parts herself.

I visited Galli once and there was an atmosphere of gloom around the place. I was asked to swear that our company would never buy goods from a firm called Cortese. Apparently an ex-pupil of Galli had set up in competition with some overlap of style. Cortese had learned everything he knew from Galli and now the Maestro was amazed that such a person could set up in competition. I told Galli that nobody could copy his handiwork or even come close but the Galli’s seemed inconsolable as they probably had considered giving this chap more responsibility for the commercial side of their business and now he had not only deserted them but turned against them. Cortese went on to make a successful enterprise which continued until 2005 but never reached the sublime heights of invention that characterised Galli’s work.

Another of Galli’s strengths was his ability to re-create the female form. His nudes sold particularly well and now have doubled in worth since Galli’s demise in 1986. He was able to pick up a piece of clay and in a few hours model it into a superb specimen of womanhood. Unlike his plain and dumpling little wife, these girls, as they emerged from the clay in Galli’s hands, were gorgeous, shapely and seductive to the point that I felt Galli was able to turn his skill into objects of desire that he was reluctant to part with. We never got full deliveries of these pieces. One such piece, a girl emerging from a banana was so seductive that it helped me sell a whole collection of Galli’s works, some 45 pieces, as long as I included an example of this piece amongst the collection. To obtain the flesh appearance of the skin areas, Galli would bombard the figurine, once glazed, with a fine blue sand hence removing the glaze and leaving the carneggione or flesh parts in a matt or bisquit finish that was most appealing.

One of Galli’s abilities was to make huge pieces, often with some political message. His ‘Poker of the Nations’ is very large, almost 80 cms across and portrays charicatures of the nations in a poker struggle round a table. Uncle Sam, John Bull, the Pope and Stalin were amongst the characters. His Moon Landing piece or ‘Cosmos’ is particularly rare and complicated. Galli was deeply affected by the moon landings by the USA starting in 1969 and he felt he had to make a contribution by creating a piece showing two girl astronauts arriving on a planet by rocket and encountering the spirit of Leonardo Davinci now in angel form. I do not suppose there are more than 6 examples ever made. I have kept one piece in Blackpool and everytime I pass I feel like upping its price because it is irreplaceable. Once Galli died there was nobody who could emulate his work. For a while an ex-pupil Roberto Brambilla (Robby B.) tried to instil life into the business but to all intents and purposes Tiziano Galli was the unique soul of the operation. Luckily I managed to purchase 90 pieces from Maria Galli which were early pieces and had been kept in a loft above the farmhouse. Of these there were some magnificent examples of Galli’s work. He loved swimming and made a huge piece of three girls swimming in the sea, each doing a different stroke. His imagination took him to creating an Undersea Kingdom were Neptune reigns and marine creatures mix with mermaids and aquanauts.

I regret I do not have a picture of Galli but will search for one amongst my possessions. In my opinion he was one of the greatest ceramicists ever born. His talent had no boundaries and I only wish he was still there in that crazy farmhouse near Monza.