Description:
English white salt-glazed stoneware, slip-cast cream pot with a wavy-edged rim, elongated projecting lip, ribbed loop handle with a pinched terminal, and three mask and paw feet. The sides are molded in low relief with scallop shells, flowers, and scrollwork. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has a block (3097-1852) matching a cast cream pot in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, made by Thomas and John Wedgwood of Burslem and inscribed "R W 1749." Mountford concludes that the block was probably made by Ralph Wood, who was responsible for some of the Wedgwood blocks. 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+69.0057 |
