A short overview
The first lustre pottery appeared around Baghdad and Samarra in about the ninth
century AD. Baghdad, then probably the world's largest city, was centre
of the vast Abbasid Arab empire. The city's rulers prized the fine porcelain
of China and set captive potters to imitate it. In response, these potters
prepared their own clays and developed white glazes to help mimic porcelain;
and, experimentally or by accident, they applied glassmakers'
techniques, dating from Roman times, to decorate this pottery with metallic
pigments. Lustre pottery was born. 
In the 10th-14th centuries, while Europe was emerging from the Dark Ages, a
lustre industry flourished in Persia, centred on the town of Kashan. Here
were created some of the most vigorous and proficient lustre ceramics ever made.
Fine lustre work appeared also in Egypt under the Fatimids at this time
and then in Syria. By the thirteenth century, lustre was being made in Moorish Spain, which had been conquered by the Arabs five hundred years earlier. Lustre survived the collapse of Arab rule during the 1400s and Hispano-Moresque potters imaginatively blended Islamic and Christian influences in a new vein of work, some made for export to France, Italy and other parts of Europe. This trade continued well into the eighteenth century. Even today a little traditional lustreware is made for the tourist market in Spain.
Trade
in lustreware to Italy sparked a new industry in that country. The towns
of Deruta, Gubbio and Caffagiolo became the centres for lustre from about
1500 AD, combining brilliant golds, silvers and ruby reds with proficient,
ornate brush decoration in non-lustrous colours, often depicting scenes
or people very realistically. A manuscript treatise of these times records
how lustreware was produced: "The Three Books of the Potter's Art" by Cipriano
Piccolpasso (1558). Further reading Northern Europe did not imitate the Spanish and Italian lustre. Dutch trading ships began to bring quantities of porcelain from the Orient. In one of history's more bizarre tales, a self-proclaimed alchemist, Boettger, held prisoner by the Elector of Saxony to produce gold, discovered in 1709 how to make porcelain from local materials - laying the foundation for the Meissen porcelain works and the entire European porcelain industry that sprang up to meet European society's appetite for "china".
Europe's ceramics industry burgeoned during the eighteenth century. In its
midst, various entrepreneurs developed new types of lustre, consistently
brighter and more reliable than the traditional kind, although far less
interesting. The tradition of a thousand years was gradually eclipsed. Several remarkable efforts to reintroduce traditional lustre techniques include those of the famous William de Morgan in the late 1800s and Pilkington's Royal Lancastrian Pottery (1891-1938). At the turn of the millennium, while some contemporary lustre potters choose to work with prepared industrial lustres, a few use the reduction-fired technique of the old days to produce distinctive ceramics.
One such is Alan Caiger-Smith, Nick's father, who since the 1960s has successfully experimented with reduction-fired lustre techniques. Nick's work now builds on that experience. Alan's book "Lustre Pottery: Technique, Tradition and Innovation in Islam and the Western World" (1985) remains the definitive story of lustre, told through a practitioner's eyes. Further reading
Some pictures by permission and copyright The University of Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1991, from "Islamic Ceramics", by James W Allan, Ashmolean-Christie's Handbooks, 1991 Links
