Joan Mary Crossley-Holland ( Cowper; 3 April 1912 – 12 January 2005) was an English gallery owner and potter. Educated at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, she began a career in pottery at Royal Doulton. After taking a break from work to raise her children, Crossley-Holland was employed as a personal assistant to the Maharana of Mewar at the Lake Palace Hotel for a year. She was appointed director of Oxford's Bear Lane Gallery in 1966 but left to establish the independent Oxford Gallery in 1968 after disagreements with trustees over whether pottery was considered art. Crossley-Holland oversaw 186 exhibitions from artists by the time she retired in 1986. Early life Crossley-Holland was born Joan Cowper at Peatling Magna, Lutterworth, Leicestershire on 3 April 1912, to the medical doctor Claude Marriott Lovell Cowper and the nurse and amateur artist Mary Bourne, née Collard. An only child, she was raised in Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire, where her father practiced his profession in Leighton Buzzard. Crossley-Holland was first taught at Plymouth Brethren Boys' School, Northfield, where she captained the first XI football team. She was later educated at Wycombe Abbey, where she learnt pottery and science. From 1931 to 1934, Crossley-Holland attended London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, taking a course in pottery. Studying opposite Dora Billington, the course gave her a life long fascination of pottery, and according to Geoffrey Findlay of The Guardian, contributed "to the general revival of the arts and crafts movement in Britain in those interwar years." Career Following the completion of her course at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, Crossley-Holland went back to Leicestershire to do her own pottery work in an independent studio. In 1936, she was offered employment as a designer at Royal Doulton in Lambeth, where she remained until 1939, where she made full-bodied rough textured pots that were praised by connoisseurs for its "simplicity and modernity", and exhibited at Heal's and Liberty and Peter Jones. When the Second World War broke out, Crossley-Holland resigned her career to become a housewife after she got married and raised her children for the following two decades in Buckinghamshire and later Hampstead. She also worked for the Social Survey. Through a mutual friend in the early 1960s, Crossley-Holland was offered the opportunity to work as a personal assistant to the Maharana of Mewar at the Lake Palace Hotel, Udaipur for a year.