The cleaning lady’s devotion to dusting has brought her family an artistic fortune worth tens of thousands of pounds

Mrs Annie Gaughan cleaned for the critically acclaimed ceramist Lucie Rie at her home in Finchley Road for many years and received some of her work as parting gifts when she gave up her job.

Rie, a refugee from Nazi Germany, is considered one of the greatest potters of the 20th century^th Century and their collectors, including the legendary fashion designer Issey Miyake, who organized an exhibition of her work in Tokyo.

Ms Gaughan’s son Austin, who decided to auction the work bequeathed to his mother, said: “My mother and father were tailors and when my mother later quit tailoring she started doing cleaning jobs and ended up preened them for about 10 years for Lucie.

“When Lucie gave Mum the bowl she became a lot more interested in her work and started looking up it and I took her down Bond Street and she went to one of the sales.

“We’ve had it for 25 years or more now. My mum gifted it to me, my wife and my son and he is now looking to buy a property and we thought it would be a great way to get him up the ladder.”

The mementos, which will go up for sale at Chiswick Auctions on March 29th, include a bowl and mold used to make her ceramic buttons, which made her a household name in the fashion world after being used by designers like Miyake .

Chiswick’s design specialist Maxine Winning says she expects the button shape to fetch £600, while an experimental bowl is set to fetch a similar amount, but Rie also gave Ms Gaughan a turquoise and manganese glazed bowl that could sell for up to £30,000.