Description:
English white salt-glazed stoneware, press-molded, oval fruit dish with eight pierced lobes separated with foliate scrollwork and basketweave molded in relief. The center has a molded medallion with a cable border with a squared pattern, surrounded by eight small panels containing trellis diaper pattern filled with dots and stars and separated by scrolls and basketwork. A similar dish in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg was inscribed "Fruit Dishes" on its bottom while the clay was still damp. This pattern, which was made in both salt-glaze and creamware, was a common Staffordshire type and was found in quantity on the Whieldon site where the creamware shards were often decorated with colored glazes. 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+61.139 |
