Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware slip-cast, relief-molded pear-shaped teapot with a four-lobed body, curved spout with a blue and green foliate spray, and hand-formed coil handle with a pinched terminal and blue C-scrolls. According to Peter Walton, this molded pear-shaped form reveals aspects of a blockcutter's practice. Despite obvious variations of detail, the basic shape and decoration has a centrally-placed pecten shell flanked by foliage or dragons, etc. on the body; serpent-shaped spouts with raised foliate details; and covers with molded-shell decorations. It seems likely that the blockmaker relied on a few basic patterns for the lid, body and spout, selling basicly the same blocks and molds to different factories, but making slight alternations for the sake of variety and customer satisfaction, which could be combined and decorated in many ways at each factory. The body is molded on each side in low relief; the two center sides have overlapping scallop or pecten shells flanked by two shells, and acorns and acorn leaves on winding stems that extend around the spout and handle. The overlapping shells are surrounded by painted floral sprays in blue, red, pink, yellow, and green, and topped with the leaning figure of a young man wearing a black tam-o'shanter and red coat who is sometimes interpreted as Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), grandson of James II (reigned 1685-1688). Prince Charles, also known as The Young Pretender, The Young Chevalier, and later, Bonnie Prince Charlie, lead the last Jacobite uprising in 1745 and was defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746; the tam o'shanter is found on several portraits of Charles. The four-lobed cover, with its white toadstool knop, has a beaded band over a band of low-relief scallop shells painted with floral sprays, and a band of red diaperwork alternating with stylized flowerheads around the rim edge. The pot's neck has bands of low relief beading, flowers, and a key pattern highlighted in red; the shaped flat base has a band of the same key pattern, unpainted. The spout has a low-relief circular shapes painted green and a green and red peapod shape by the rim. 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+67.205 |
