Description:
With no Chinese porcelain protypes to copy, British ceramic tea canisters of the 18th century took several different forms. They are mostly, however, square or octagonal with a wide cylindrical lip, and seem to derive from the japanned metal canisters used for displaying and dispensing tea and coffee in grocers' shops. By contrast, smarter tea canisters of glass or silver tended to copy the wooden tea chest, complete with its wavy metal edging and corners. Only later in the century was the little baluster-shaped canister copied by English porcelain factories (for example, Worcester) which imitated Chinese vase-like versions made solely for export. English salt-glazed stoneware, vase-shaped tea canister with a replaced lid, which has an acorn knob and a drilled hole to let out steam, decorated with large and small floral sprays in pink, purple, yellow, green, black, and blue. 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.
Subjects:
Pottery; Enamel and enameling; glaze (coating by location); polychrome; Stoneware Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+66.033 |
