Bernard Howell Leach CH CBE (5 January 1887 – 6 May 1979) was a British studio potter and art teacher.

In Tokyo, he gave talks and attended meetings along with Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, Yanagi Sōetsu and others from the "Shirakaba-Group",[Sub 1] who were trying to introduce western art to Japan after 250 years of seclusion.

[8] Popularized in the 1940s after the publication of A Potter's Book, his style had lasting influence on counter-culture and modern design in North America during the 1950s and 1960s.

Another of his students at St Ives was William Worrall who became chief craftsman at the Chalice Well crafts guild in Glastonbury and Muriel Bell, co-founder of the Lanchester Marionettes.

[10] His American apprentices include Warren MacKenzie (who likewise influenced many potters through his teaching at the University of Minnesota), Byron Temple.

He was a major influence on New Zealand potter Len Castle who travelled to London to spend time working with him in the mid-1950s.

[13][14] Leach was instrumental, with Muriel Rose, in organising the only International Conference of Potters and Weavers in July 1952 at Dartington Hall, where he had been working and teaching.

[15] It included exhibitions of British pottery and textiles since 1920, Mexican folk art, and works by conference participants, among them Shoji Hamada and US-based Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain.

According to Brent Johnson, "The most important outcome of the conference was that it helped organize the modern studio pottery movement by giving a voice to the people who became its leaders...it gave them [Leach, Hamada and Yanagi] celebrity status...[while] Marguerite Wildenhain emerged from Dartington Hall as the most important craft potter in America.

[21] Edmund de Waal, British ceramic artist and writer, was apprenticed to the potter Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Leach, at the King's School, Canterbury in the early 1980's.

[33] De Waal also notes that poetry used in the tradition of Kenzan I would not be legible to Leach, who would straightforwardly say that he could not read Japanese texts.

[34] Leach did learn to speak the language to a conversational standard, however; recordings of this are held by the Mingei Film Archive and the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

[35] The book acknowledges Leach's strength as an artist, his sophisticated mark-making and sensitivity to the surface qualities of the clay, while providing an examination of the Orientalism in his thinking and making.