Description: English salt-glazed stoneware punch bowl decorated in pink, green, yellow, and blue in a chinoiseire design. The outside has two large flowering vines with pink, blue and yellow flowers and buds; two parrots (an unusual pattern), one dark green and the other light green, sit on the vines. The interior rim has green trellis pattern alternating with white floral lozenges panels, bordered by pink band. The well has large blue and pink flower surrounded by leaves and buds.The bowl has a wheel-thrown hemispherical body with flat tapered base and slightly out-turned rim. 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; Enamel and enameling; glaze (coating by location); polychrome; Stoneware Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+58.271 |