Description:
English dotted slipware (dotware) cup with flared rim over slightly curved sides, foot rim, and a loop handle. The exterior and interior of the cup is covered with a mustard-colored glaze, with two rows of irregularly-spaced and sized dark brown dots encircling the body; the lower row of dots has bled together to become a continuous, bumpy line; and the mustard glaze ends at the bottom of the handle. According to a card found in the cup: "Slip ware mug / used in the "Old Cushing House, Kingston, Mass./ House built in 1699/ Mr. Cushing was the first Ship Builder of the Pilgrim Colony." This may be Capt. Joshua Cushing (1670-1750) who married Mary Bacon (b.1680) in 1699, and later moved to Kingston where he was recorded owning a saw mill and dam in 1715. Cushing is referenced in "History of Ship Building on North River" by L. Vernon Briggs (1889). Kingston is a town just north of Plymouth and just south of Duxbury, MA, on the south shore of Massachusetts. According to Leslie Grigsby in her "English Slip-Decorated Earthenware at Williamsburg": "The use of dots, whether large or small, dark-on-light, or light-on-dark, was popular in the Midlands throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." Slip-decorated earthenware or slipware found use as inexpensive, imported vessels for household purposes such as food storage, preparation, and service. A wide range of these wares were sold throughout Britain and to the colonies, and have been found at excavations throughout New England. Utilitarian slipwares persisted on the English ceramic market; shards of this type of pottery dating to circa 1760, were found in the excavation of Dr. Thomas Williams (1718-1775) privy pit in Deerfield.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+68.016 |
