Description:
English white salt-glazed stoneware, pear-shaped cream jug with a slip-cast body with a wavy-edged rim, long pinched spout, strap handle ending in a pinched terminal, and three mask and paw feet. The body is decorated with pectin shells interspersed with floral, orange peel, and rope designs in low relief, and blue underglaze splashes covering the body and handle. A block for a similar type jug (3097-1852) in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is inscribed "R. W. 1749." Montford has shown that this block can be linked with salt-glaze made by Thomas and John Wedgwood of Burslem. 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); Stoneware Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+62.019 |
