Description:
English delft punch bowl decorated in blue on a purple powdered ground. The exterior has three light blue fish with sponged blue upper fins and dark blue tails over a coarsely purple powdered ground that covers the upper 3/4 of the sides; the well is decorated with a blue fish. Fish are a decorative motif commonly found on and in the wells of punch bowls. The fish acts as a visual pun; the punch bowl needs to be kept filled with liquid so that the fish can swim. Later creamware punch bowls combined a fish with the toast "Keep Me Swimming" as an exhortation to drink more. Fish-decorated punch bowls, which were produced by all the delft potteries, were very popular in the American colonies from the 1740s to the mid-1770s. Several references to the sale of these bowls appear in the papers of Frederick Rhinelander (1743-1805), a New York ceramics and glass merchant, of the second half of the eighteenth century, and 18th century newspapers advertised "Fish Dishes and Strainers". Henry Field (1759-1813) and Rhoda Stratton Field (1761-1833) of Northfield, Massachusetts, owned a bowl similar to this example. Rhoda Field was the daughter of the Northfield tavernkeeper Hezekiah Stratton whose estate contained numerous ceramics. The couple probably received the punch bowl as a wedding gift from one of their parents. Fragments with fish on a powdered ground have been found in excavations at Hart-Shortridge House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Wetherburn's Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia. Powdered ground fish-bordered plates and a few other shapes, that have survived above ground, are known in some numbers. On one unusual plate, dated 1747, four fish are set against a powdered purple border that frames a reserve depicting the Crucifixion. Powdered manganese ground tableware and punch bowls depicting fish appear to have been very popular in eighteenth-century America. Early orders for such wares survive, and fragments of these ceramic forms have been excavated from colonial contexts at archaeological sites up and down the east coast. A portion of a punch bowl was excavated in Portsmouth, NH, and is in the collection of the Strawbery Banke Museum.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+67.183 |
