THE death of a celebrated Liverpool artist will pave the way for a new generation to study in the city – thanks to an incredible bequest worth more than £1m.

Young potters and sculptors are to be given the chance for advanced study in Liverpool thanks to the city's renowned ceramic artist Julia Carter Preston, who died last month.

In her lifetime Julia was renowned for her generosity and hospitality, and now the bulk of her estate is to be used to set up a charitable trust to help young artists study for their masters degrees at Liverpool Hope University.

The house in Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter that she shared with her husband, Michael Pugh Thomas, who died last year, has already been sold subject to contract, having been put on the market at £450,000.

Professional valuers have yet to finish work on her collection of art and antiques, but the final figure is expected to be at least double the house value.

Alan Whittaker, head of fine and applied arts at the university, is one of the trustees of the new fund.

“It had all been planned while Julia and Mike were still alive, but it couldn’t come into existence legally before she died, at the end of January,” he said.

Officially entitled the Liverpool Hope University Julia Carter Preston Foundation, its aim will be to award scholarships and bursaries in creative and visual arts for study at Liverpool Hope at masters level and beyond.

Its chairman will be Professor Gerald Pillay, the university’s vice chancellor, and other trustees include Julian Treuherz, former keeper of art galleries for National Museums Merseyside.

Julia Carter Preston was the last of an artistic dynasty in Liverpool. Her father was Edward Carter Preston – universally known as ECP – who created the bronze memorial plaque handed to every British family who had lost a member during the First World War. Then in the 1930s he joined Liverpool Cathedral as its chief sculptor, creating a range of reliefs and sculptures, often using his family as models– which is how his infant daughter Julia came to be immortalised in stone as the baby Jesus .

He had married Marie Tyson Smith, whose brother Herbert was also a sculptor. He had created another much-loved memorial to the fallen of 1914-18: the reliefs surrounding the cenotaph on St George’s Plateau in Liverpool.

Working with the soap magnate Lord Leverhulme, ECP and Herbert Tyson Smith founded the studio complex at the Bluecoat in the centre of Liverpool in the 1920s. It was a home to Liverpool creative talents for over 80 years, with probably the most illustrious being Julia, youngest of ECP’s four daughters.

She specialised in ceramics at Liverpool College of Art in the 1940s and in the mid-1950s moved into studio space at the Bluecoat.

As a teacher she became head of ceramics at Liverpool College of Art, where she once tutored John Lennon, but from the mid-1970s she was a full-time potter and ceramicist.

She mastered the distinctive graffito style, and her works are in museums and churches across the world, as well as the private collections of royalty and her many friends.