Antique Collecting: Pottery And Porcelain: English pottery

Antique Collecting: Pottery And Porcelain

English pottery

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Enoch Wood and John Walton were prominent among makers of figures, many of them of small size and coloured in opaque enamels with green predominating. Many of Walton's bear an impressed stamp with the name of the maker. Later pieces, introduced in about 1850, are the well-known Staffordshire chimneypiece ornaments in the form of portrait-figures, often unrecognizable without the name painted on the front of the base, ranging from politicians to murderers.

Much of the nineteenth-century ware was marked by the makers, but often only with initials which do not help the collector very much. Printed pieces usually have the name of the pattern.

Stoneware. Stoneware is a very hard non-porous type of pottery, introduced into England in the sixteenth century from Germany. A feature of the ware is that it was glazed by putting common salt into the kiln while it was being fired; thus arises the term salt-glazed stoneware. The resulting pottery is hard, strong and watertight, and it can be made into objects much thinner in body than can ordinary clay pottery.

Nottingham was a big centre for making stoneware from the late seventeenth century, and pieces with a hard grey body and a brown glaze of orange-peel texture came from there. Many such pieces bear names and dates. Other factories nearby in Derbyshire made similar wares.

A factory at Fulham, a suburb of London, was founded by John Dwight in 1671. A number of pieces made by him, after two centuries in the possession of his family and now in the British and Victoria and Albert Museums, are extraordinarily well modelled, and it has been suggested that they are the work of the wood-carver and sculptor, Grinling Gibbons. Dwight claimed to have invented a method of making porcelain, but nothing resembling our modern meaning of the term can be attributed to him.

In Staffordshire, a red stoneware in imitation of some imported from China, was made by two Dutch brothers named Elers, who had worked at one time with Dwight at Fulham. By 1725 Dwight's greyish stoneware had been improved in colour until it was nearly white, and it was not long before this excellent salt-glazed material was being potted in quantity in the Staffordshire towns, in Liverpool, and elsewhere. Most of the ware, which was made not only into domestic articles but also figures, was ornamented with raised patterns, and the thin smear of glaze with which it was covered did not clog the delicate lines as a flowing lead-glaze would have done. Both overglaze and underglaze colours were used with great effect.

While white stoneware was finally unable to withstand the competition of Queen's Ware and porcelain, a further refinement of materials and technique enabled Wedgwood to produce with it his celebrated jasper ware. This is the pottery from which were made the thousands of relief portraits, plaques and vases that spread the name of their inventor and maker throughout the world. In addition to this ware, most familiar when coloured blue but made also in pale shades of yellow, lilac and green Wedgwood developed a black stoneware (basaltes), a red stone¬ware (rosso antico) and a buff-coloured (cane ware), all of which contributed to the fame and expansion of Staffordshire.

It is as well to remember that the descendants of Josiah Wedgwood are still making jasper and basaltes wares, and have done so continuously since the eighteenth century. The oldest examples reveal their age by the superior fineness of their modelling and the velvet-like smoothness of their surface.

Brown stoneware was made throughout the nineteenth century, but the productions are far from exciting. Flasks in the form of politicians and pistols were made, and a large number of jugs in imitation of seventeenth-century originals often deceive collectors.

Tin-glazed Earthenware. Sometime before 1600, with help from Continental potters and in imitation of Continental wares, English potters were able to make a great advance. It was by using an opaque white glaze on which coloured designs could be painted; a method originating in Italy. This type of pottery, glazed with a composition based on oxide of tin, which was available readily in England, is known as delftware from the similar ware made at Delft in Holland; although the latter town did not become connected with pottery-making until some time after English manufacture had started. The beginner has to beware of confusing English delftware with Dutch Delftware; a confusion that is not restricted to the verbal sense. For, it was emigrant Dutch potters who came to England and started making tin-glazed earthenware in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The first Dutch potters settled at Norwich, but nothing of their work has been identified positively. The earliest ware of the type is a series of brightly coloured jugs, named after the village in Kent where one was once kept in the church, West Mailing, near Maidstone. One of these 'Mailing1 jugs has a silver mount dated 1550, and others bear later dates between then and 1600.

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