Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware slip-cast, relief-molded pear-shaped teapot with an curved, open-mouth snake spout with a molded wheat pattern along its length; hand-formed coil handle with two notches on top and a pinched terminal; and flat oval base. According to Mountford, the cast shell teapot was a popular shape from about 1745 onwards. The oval lid has a mushroom-shaped knop over a band of molded vertical ribs, and a plain flat rim. Both sides have four overlapping, relief-molded pectin shells flanked by two sea creatures; one side has a crown in a lunette over the molded shells, and the other has a mask. 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+63.106 |
