Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware slip-cast, relief-molded pear-shaped teapot with an curved, open-mouth snake spout with a molded wheat pattern along its length; hand-formed coil handle with two notches on top and a pinched terminal; and flat oval base. According to Mountford, the cast shell teapot was a popular shape from about 1745 onwards. The oval lid has a mushroom-shaped knop over a band of molded vertical ribs, and a plain flat rim. Both sides have four overlapping, relief-molded pectin shells flanked by two sea creatures; one side has a crown in a lunette over the molded shells, and the other has a mask. Although Staffordshire white stoneware had been perfected by about 1720, its possibilities for mass-production were not fully exploited until the 1740s. Then the techniques of press-moulding, slip-casting and enamelling were developed, and the drabness of the greyish stoneware surface was successfully relieved by the addition of all-over decoration. The glaze on the stoneware was the result of throwing salt into a high temperature oven (1000-1100 degrees), where the heat caused the salt to volatilise and the soda in the salt to combine with the alumina and silica in the clay to form a thin vitreous glass-coating over the surface. That outer layer has characteristic minute pitting. Since there are no factory markings, it is very difficult to link pot with potter.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+63.106 |
