Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware mustard pot and lid decorated with scratch-blue swirls and a floral pattern. Around 1750 the decorative technique collectors now call "scratch blue" became popular. Simeon Shaw's "The History of the Staffordshire Potteries" (1829) gives an account of this process: "The Flowerers now scratched the jugs and tea ware, with a sharp pointed nail, and filled the interstices with ground zaffre [a mixture of cobalt ore and sand], in rude imitation of the unmeaning scenery on foreign porcelain; and this art the woman were instructed..." This technique did indeed imitate the more expensive blue and white porcelain, often depiciting stylized flowers and rouletted borders. The pot has a wheel-thrown cylindrical shape, flat base, sloping shoulder, and rolled handle with pinched terminal. The circular lid, which rests on top of the rim, has seven incised blue crescents swirling out from the round knop. The body is decorated with scratch-blue flower and leaves, some filled with blue hatch marks. A fragment of a plain white salt-glazed stoneware cover was found in Portsmouth, NH, at the Warner House. The 1794 probate inventory of William Arms of Deerfield, MA, listed "Do. [white] Tea & Mustard Pot" valued at £0.0.6; "jug" valued at £0.0.8;
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+63.145 |
