Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware oval sauceboat in green, blue-grey, pink, yellow and brown, which has an ovoid slip-cast body bulging out on both sides and around the spout, an applied fluted-strap handle with a pinched terminal, and a tapered foot with a scalloped relief design in green and yellow. There is a low relief basketweave pattern on sides and smooth areas around the spout and handle; set off by a raised vine border in pink and blue-grey outlining the floral sprigs around the spout and handle and the center reserves of each side; and an acanthus leaf base. There are two reserves: one has a scene of an elegantly-dressed woman at a tea table; the other has a landscape scene with a building, fence, and field. The inside of the spout has half of a blue flower. According to Maurice Hillis, ceramics scholar (in March, 2003), the same mold for this stoneware sauceboat was used at the William Reid porcelain factory in Liverpool, England, circa 1760. The enameled ornament on this sauce boat links it to other examples, most of which have relief "barley" (or "rice") grounds, rather than a basket weave texture. Although from different molds, the boats typically have scroll-framed reserves and show a generally similar range of enamels reflecting a similar approach to the coloring of the rim, reserve borders, and base. One barley ground sauce boat, with flowered lip and handle reserves, has one large reserve with a hatless lady resembling Deerfield's tea-drinker in pose and costume, but she sits out-of-doors and plays a harpsichord. (The second large reserve depicts a church in a landscape.) On another example, a somewhat similar lady sits fishing from a riverbank. A different boat includes a building resembling that on Deerfield's but has different flowers at the handle and pouring lip and, in place of a scene with a lady, depicts a flying Cupid who shoots arrows at a pair of winged hearts. The same scenes, differently detailed, ornament another sauceboat, this one with shell clusters rather than flowers painted in the lip and handle reserves. 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. 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.
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