Description:
With no Chinese porcelain protoypes to copy, British ceramic tea canisters of the 18th century took several different forms. They are mostly, however, square or octagonal with a wide cylindrical lip, and seem to derive from the japanned metal canisters used for displaying and dispensing tea and coffee in grocers' shops. By contrast, smarter tea canisters of glass or silver tended to copy the wooden tea chest, complete with its wavy metal edging and corners. Only later in the century was the little baluster-shaped canister copied by English porcelain factories (for example, Worcester) which imitated Chinese vase-like versions made solely for export. Rectangular English creamware tea canister with a shaped sloping neck and flat cover; and panels on each side of the body, shoulder, and on the lid, each surrounded by molded borders of an egg and quatrefoil repeat design and decorated with red flowers with green and yellow leaves (possibly Dutch decorated?). The canister retains its original rectangular, flat lid which is also molded on all sides with a repeating egg and quatrefoil design. The interior of the lid has a small rectangular flange for seating it in the opening or mouth of the tea canister. This canister is part of a small group of tea canisters with this unusual sloping neck design are in creamware with metallic oxide colored decoration and sprigging. Examples known include a similarly-decorated example in Bonhams Sampson and Horne Sale, April 28, 2010, lot 457, and others such as Pl. 64 illustrated by Barnard Rackham in "Early Staffordshire Pottery" in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum along with two other similarly-shaped canisters which the curator Hilary Young thought were probably made in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and others in private collections. Author David Doxey suggests that, other than examples similar to HD's canister, they all originate from a single source - perhaps a Staffordshire-based pottery operating around 1775 to 1790. HD's example shares only size, shape and color with the other and may have been made in another factory and be earlier. Although nominally attributed to the Staffordshire potting region, there were certainly other potteries making creamware and operating at that same time in Devonshire and Yorkshire. There is no evidence that the form of sprig molds used on several of the tea canisters illustrated by Doxey have were made at the Leeds pottery in Yorkshire or at the Bovey Tracey pottery in Devonshire.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+57.193 |
