Description:
In 1821, Thomas Crafts (1781-1861) of Whately, Massachusetts began to make redware teapots with a dark lustrous black glaze imitating English blackware, a ceramic popular in England from the mid 18th to the early 19th century. His production soon enjoyed impressive sales of $4000 annually with his teapots shipped to New York City and Philadelphia. Sanford S. Perry was the first Whately potter to produce these black-glazed redware teapots (one inscribed 1817 is in the Whately Historical Society), but he left Whately about 1821, possibly after selling his glaze formulas to Crafts, and was in Troy, NY, about 1823 where he worked in earthenware and stoneware. Shards excavated by Lura Woodside Watkins at the Whately pottery site (now owned by the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution) do match the shape and features of this teapot, but there is a tendency to attribute all black glazed teapots to Thomas Crafts' production. The appearance of the black glazed teapots made by Sanford Perry and other competitors located in Troy and Athens, New York as well as Charlestown, Massachusetts, are not known at this time. Archaeological fragments of a thrown redware teapot and separate spout, teapot is bulbous in shape with a tapered base and rounded shoulders, a large portion of the side is missing, separated from the teapot is the spout which is a molded s-curved spout with a suggestion of flutes at the base of the spout, the pot and spout were covered with a lustrous manganese black or dark brown lead glaze on a reddish body, but during the firing the kiln became too hot and the glaze bubbled off of the surface of the pot and it became a waster or a piece to be thrown away. Presumably collected at the Crafts redware kiln site in Whately, MA. This object was originally part of the Burton N. Gates Collection. A pencil note on white paper inside the tea pot (now in the datafile) reads: "Whately/ Black Teapot (fragment)/ as excavated 1918"
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2014.4.194 |
