Description:
English Staffordshire salt-glazed stoneware saucer (with matching teacup, HD 2002.7.1 decorated with a scratch blue design with two slightly-scalloped blue lines around the rim over three floral sprigs, a rouletted circle decoration in-filled with cobalt in the center, and an applied footrim. Around 1750 the decorative technique collectors now call "scratch blue" became popular. Simeon Shaw's "The History of the Staffordshire Potteries" (1829) gives an account of this process: "The Flowerers now scratched the jugs and tea ware, with a sharp pointed nail, and filled the interstices with ground zaffre [a mixture of cobalt ore and sand], in rude imitation of the unmeaning scenery on foreign porcelain; and this art the woman were instructed..." This technique did indeed imitate the more expensive blue and white porcelain, often depiciting stylized flowers and rouletted borders such as this example. In 1988, a fragment of a scratch-blue saucer was found at the Nims House site in Deerfield.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2002.7.2 |
