Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware, small pear-shaped jug with an everted rim, beak-shaped spout, ribbed loop handle with a pinched terminal, and slightly spreading foot, which is decorated in blue, green, yellow, pinks, brown, and black. This jug form was made for many years and produced in delftware, salt-glazed stoneware, creamware, etc. The sides are decorated with a landscape setting with a woman in pink and green and a church in pink, blue, yellow and black in the background between the right of the handle and spout, and a young man wearing a blue coat and yellow pants and holding a shepherd's crook with hills in the background on the left side; both are surrounded with clouds, trees and shrubs. These figures may be compared with a well-known Leeds design known as "Miss Pit," based on a salt-glazed teapot (formerly in the Gollancz Collection, sold at Sotheby's London, July 15, 1975, lot 138) inscribed with that name. Variations of this design, such as seating at a tea table by herself or drinking punch with a man, is found both on salt-glazed stoneware and creamware. Interstingly, the church depicted on this jug is very similar in style and coloring to a building in the well of a punch bowl (#171) pictured on the frontispiece of Walton's "Creamware and other English Pottery at Temple Newsam House, Leeds," which he catalogues from Yorkshire and painted in Leeds. The rim has a green band around the inside and a blue band around the outside, both with black swirling lines; and the exterior of the spout has a trellis diaper pattern with dots on a pink pink ground. 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.
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+57.114 |
