Description:
English white salt-glazed stoneware, press-molded triangular sweetmeat dish with an overall decoration of vines and flowers, shells at each of the three corners, and a crowned head on one side in low relief. Similar dishes are known to have been made by Thomas and John Wedgwood of the Big House, Burslem, Staffordshire. 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. The "pickle saucers" owned by William Hunter of Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1761 may have been similar in appearance to the shard of the press molded triangular sweetmeat dish excavated from the Timberlake-Dana site in the same community. Judging from the many extant specimens, this pattern was well loved. Pickle or sweetmeat dishes were commonly used in conjunction with the main meal to offer small pickled or sweet treats to diners.
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+63.073 |
