Description:
English white salt-glazed stoneware, press-molded dessert plate with relief decoration including an attenuated spray of five leaves flanked by acorn-like berries, the whole set against a veined ground in the well; and clusters of three leaves, partly set against trelliswork, forming the border. Based on their having raised ornament in the central reserves, pieces of this type may also have been employed as serving dishes. Salt-glazed stoneware models were made in several sizes, probably at more than one factory; creamware versions sometimes are decorated in tortoiseshell sponging or in painted colors. Both Whieldon and Wedgwood are known to have manufactured dishes with this design, both in plain white and enamelled salt-glazed stoneware; and Rackham describes similar plates made in salt-glazed stoneware and colored, lead-glazed earthenware in the Glaisher collection. Salt-glazed white stoneware leaf-shaped dishes display similarly modeled seven-leaf relief motifs with birds against the same type of naturalistically veined grounds (see HD 60.205). Perhaps the molds for these and the Historic Deerfield dish were created by the same craftsman. According to Peter Spang's catalogue record in 1982, the plate's naturalistic leaf could be inspired by Diospyros (Indian Date Plum), which was brought from the Bolivian (?) Garden, Padua, Italy to the Chelsea Physics Garden (London), in 1756. The design is illustrated in Philip Miller's "Chelsea Medicram Plants" (1775). 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 any pot with a specific potter. This plate was formerly in the collection of John B. Morris, given to Deerfield Academy (#1077/1003), and then purchased by HD in 1982.
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+82.006 |
