Description:
English delft punch bowl decorated in blue, speckled purple powdered ground, and sgraffito designs. The exterior has ten blue fish: Five groups of two fish each (thought to be a mullet crossed by a sand smelt) in a "+" shape, with small sgraffito circles in each corner of the "+" and two stylized foliate design between each group. Fish are a decorative motif commonly found on and in the wells of punch bowl. The fish acts as a visual pun; the punch bowl needs to be kept filled with liquid so that the fish can swim. Later creamware punch bowls combined a fish with the toast "Keep Me Swimming" as an exhortation to drink more. Fish-decorated punch bowls, which were produced by all the delft potteries, were very popular in the American colonies from the 1740s to the mid-1770s. Several references to the sale of these bowls appear in the papers of Frederick Rhinelander (1743-1805), a New York ceramics and glass merchant, of the second half of the eighteenth century, and 18th century newspapers advertised "Fish Dishes and Strainers". Fragments with fish on a powdered ground have been found in excavations at Hart-Shortridge House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Wetherburn's Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia. The interior has five concentric blue bands, and it has been suggested that the rings may have aided the preparation of punch. The tall, uncolored applied foot ring has two holes probably used for hanging. According to Jonathan Horne, 1/23/95, he believes that the crossed fishes may possibly be a Bristol decoration that relates to a boss in the vault of the Bristol Cathedral. Powdered ground fish-bordered plates and a few other shapes, that have survived above ground, are known in some numbers. On one unusual plate, dated 1747, four fish are set against a powdered purple border that frames a reserve depicting the Crucifixion. Powdered manganese ground tableware and punch bowls depicting fish appear to have been very popular in eighteenth-century America. Early orders for such wares survive, and fragments of these ceramic forms have been excavated from colonial contexts at archaeological sites up and down the east coast.
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