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.
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+58.272 |
