Description:
English white salt-glazed stoneware, press-molded circular hot-water dish, which is filled with hot water and used to keep the food warm after being placed on the table. A similar form in creamware was called a 'water-dish' in the Leeds Pattern Book (no. 98). Plates of this form are rare in white salt-glazed stoneware and are most commonly found in pewter. Most ceramic examples are made of more durable Chinese export porcelain. Also notable is the plate’s retention of its original ceramic closure for the water slot. The dish top has a rim with a trellis diaper pattern filled with dots ans stars and separated separated by scrollwork and basketwork in low relief; a plain well; two attached rib-molded, D-shaped handles and a small draining spout for water set on the sides of the hollow water reservoir. 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. 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; glaze (coating by location); Stoneware Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+59.018 |
