Description: English white salt-glazed stoneware, press-molded plate with a wavy-edged rim with six panels of a trellis diaper pattern of stars alternating with a trellis diaper pattern with dots in green, separated by paired plumes in pink, molded in low relief. The well is decorated with a chinoiserie deisgm of a red, running fence with two large floral sprays: one has a large pink, tiny-petalled flower with blue, red, and yellow petals above, and the other has a yellow and red-striped flower with blue petals above. Designs that incorporate a fenced garden were adapted from Chinese export porcelain patterns are commonly found on Staffordshire salt-glazed stonewares. 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. The plate is similar to HD 64.244.1.
Subjects: Pottery; Copper; Enamel and enameling; glaze (coating by location); Stoneware Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+1998.855 |