Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware, slip-cast, hexagonal teapot with decorated panels in white, red, pink, green, brown, yellow, and blue decoration and a chartreuse-colored ground (an uncommon, colored ground inspired from models from Sevres and Meissen). The six recessed, relief-molded oval panels around the sides have chinoiserie scenes: two walking men with baskets; a pagoda, temple and fence; a lady holding up an umbrella crossing a bridge; a fence and steps leading up to a large building; man riding in a howdah on a camel; and two men passing each other, each carrying a lantern. These scenes were inspired by John Stalker and George Parker's "Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing", published in Oxford in 1688, which contained instructions and sample designs for use when japanning (imitation Asian lacquer) 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 mounded 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 this example, he had not seen a "ceramic look-alike." This teapot has a hexagonal, domed lid with a Chinese recumbant lion knop (or perhaps a mythical beast); crabstock spout; an applied flower and leaf molded handle with a pinched terminal; and a 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.
Tags:
pagodas Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+65.033 |
