Description: English salt-glazed stoneware waste bowl decorated with chinoiserie flowers in green, pink, yellow, blue and rust. The exterior is decorated with a running fence on a hill with two large floral sprays in green, pink, yellow, blue and rust. Designs incorporating a fenced garden were freely adapted from Chinese porcelain patterns and are commonly found on Staffordshire salt-glazed stoneware. The interior rim has a border of white floral lozenges and green asterisk trellis, and a yellow and rust flower in the well. The bowl has a wheel-thrown hemispherical body with bulging sides, slightly turned out rim, and applied flat foot with turned lines above the foot. 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 bowl matches HD 1998.854.
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+59.139 |