Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware, slip-cast hexagonal teapot with six decorated panels in pink, yellow, and green and a sponged lilac ground (a colored ground inspired by examples from Sevres and Meissen). The six recessed, relief-molded oval panels have five chinoiserie scenes of buildings in landscapes and one of a Chinese figure holding a pennant. These scenes were inspired by John Stalker and George Parker's "Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing" (Oxford, 1688), which contained instructions and sample designs for use when japanning (imitation Asian lacquerwork) surfaces on furniture, boxes, or other objects. These designs remained sources for potters over the next sixty years, especially influencing relief ornamentation on white salt-glazed stoneware and lead-glazed red earthenware from 1725-1765, with the characteristic zig-zagging fences, spired and screened buildings, and rounded hills. Similarly-shaped, slip-cast, lead-glazed teapots wasters with different relief scenes have also been found at Samuel Bell's Pomona Works at Newcastle-under-Lyme (1724-1744) and at a site in Shelton, Staffordshire. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, also has a Chinese export silver hexagonal teapot with three six, shaped oval panels with Chinese scenes, which has a London sponsor's mark with a London date letter for 1682. According to a 1996 letter from H. A. Crosby Forbes, then Curator Emeritus at the museum, numerous English silversmiths made copies down over the years, but until seing another HD example (HD 65.033), he had not seen a "ceramic look-alike." The pot has a hexagonal domed cover has a chartreuse Chinese recumbant lion knop (or perhaps a mythical beast), which is not the original cover; chartreuse crabstock handle and spout set off by lilac colored ground of the body and lid; and hexagonal foot. 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+67.207 |
