Grayson Perry

Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003 and collected it as Claire. The pots are the core of the work: classically thrown vessels, glazed and gilded and entirely handsome from across a room, covered on inspection with photographic transfers and incised text about class, taste, child abuse, Brexit, masculinity and his own childhood. The distance between how they look and what they say is the whole method, and it is why they reward being handled and read rather than admired from the doorway.

Because each pot is unique and ceramic, condition governs this market more directly than it does for most contemporary artists. A crack, a chip to a rim or a restored break reduces value substantially, and restoration on a glazed and gilded surface is very difficult to make invisible under raking light or UV. Anything offered should be examined properly rather than photographed from four feet away, and shipping is a genuine risk that should be priced into a sale route rather than discovered afterwards.

The tapestries are the other significant body of unique and editioned work — The Vanity of Small Differences among them — and they are large, heavy textile objects with their own light, hanging and cleaning constraints. Cast-iron sculpture, the Essex house, and a very substantial output of etchings and screenprints in editions of roughly fifty to two hundred and fifty complete the picture. The prints are what most owners hold and are the accessible end of the market.

Perry is also, unusually for an artist at this level, a broadcaster and writer with a large public audience, and that has had a real effect on demand: the buyers for the prints and the buyers for the pots are not always the same people, and a good deal of the print market is made by people who came to the work through the television and the books rather than through a gallery. That is a strength in a sale rather than a caveat, provided the route is chosen to reach them.