Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware, press-molded platter in pink, green, blue, and yellow with an applied flat foot. The wavy-edged rim has a dot and star trelliswork alternating with basketweave panels, separated by painted plumes. The well has a landscape scene, probably inspired by engravings of popular European scenes, with a man holding staff with a steer and a donkey tooking at a seated woman holding a baby with a ruin of a stone building behind them; a man walking on a path to a cottage on the right; and a river, buldings, and hills in the background on the left. 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. Colorfully painted stoneware using enameled decoration was being produced in Staffordshire by the mid 1750. Since these pieces required a second firing to fuse the enamels onto the glazed surface, these wares were more expensive than white stoneware. 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+58.272 |
