Description:
English white salt-glazed stoneware, press-molded and hand-modelled figurine of a gentleman supported on a flat, rectangular base. Mountford shows the same figurine with polychrome enamel (in the collection of NYC's Metropolitan Musuem of Art), which he notes was probably copied form porcelain originals. The man is wearing a tricorn hat, waistcoat and open coat, kneepants, hose, and shoes with buckles; and is standing against a tree stump, which has leaf-shaped incisions, with one hand on his hip and the other in his pocket. 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+63.180 |
