Description:
English salt-glazed stoneware, small pear-shaped jug with an everted rim, beak-shaped spout, ribbed loop handle with a pinched terminal, and slightly spreading foot, which is decorated in blue, green, yellow, pinks, brown, and black. This jug form was made for many years and produced in delftware, salt-glazed stoneware, creamware, etc. The sides are decorated with a landscape setting with a woman in pink and green and a church in pink, blue, yellow and black in the background between the right of the handle and spout, and a young man wearing a blue coat and yellow pants and holding a shepherd's crook with hills in the background on the left side; both are surrounded with clouds, trees and shrubs. These figures may be compared with a well-known Leeds design known as "Miss Pit," based on a salt-glazed teapot (formerly in the Gollancz Collection, sold at Sotheby's London, July 15, 1975, lot 138) inscribed with that name. Variations of this design, such as seating at a tea table by herself or drinking punch with a man, is found both on salt-glazed stoneware and creamware. Interstingly, the church depicted on this jug is very similar in style and coloring to a building in the well of a punch bowl (#171) pictured on the frontispiece of Walton's "Creamware and other English Pottery at Temple Newsam House, Leeds," which he catalogues from Yorkshire and painted in Leeds. The rim has a green band around the inside and a blue band around the outside, both with black swirling lines; and the exterior of the spout has a trellis diaper pattern with dots on a pink pink ground. 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.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+57.114 |
