Cecil Baugh

Baugh was born on November 22, 1908, in Bangor Ridge, Portland Parish, Jamaica to Isaac Baugh, a sawyer, and Emma Cobran-Baugh, a farmer.^[1] He attended the Bangor Ridge Primary School.^[2][3] Baugh then moved to Kingston, the capital city, and began an apprenticeship under Susan and Ethel Trenchfield from Saint Elizabeth Parish.^[4] Later, he worked alongside Wilfred Lord a free form potter. Baugh sold much of his early pottery as a 'yabba man', selling at street markets. Baugh then worked as a groundsman at the St. James Country Club in Montego Bay, and later as a door-to-door pottery salesman in Kingston. He soon returned to Montego Bay where he opened his own studio and kiln, the Cornwall Clay Works. In 1938, at an arts and crafts exhibition in Kingston, he met the painter Albert Huie, who became a lifelong friend.^[5]

In 1941, Baugh volunteered for the British Army. He served as a sapper with the Royal Engineers for a year in Clitheroe, Lancashire. He was stationed in Cairo, Egypt for three years, where he was introduced to a method of pottery glazing which mirrored his self-invented 'Egyptian Blue'. Baugh was then transferred to Aden, Yemen, where he was given time off to attend art school.^[5] In 1946 he returned to Jamaica where he opened a pottery studio on Mountain View Avenue in Kingston. He then travelled to the United Kingdom in June 1948, on board the Empire Windrush, where he studied with Margaret Leach and the famous British potter Bernard Leach.^[6] He returned to Jamaica in 1949 and in 1950 mounted his first one-man exhibition. In 1962, Baugh, Albert Huie, Linden Leslie, Jerry Isaacs, and Edna Manley formed the Jamaica School of Art, now the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. Baugh taught at the institution until his retirement in 1975.^[6][7]