Part II POTTERY AND PORCELAIN

Chapter 7. English pottery  

THE type of pottery described in the previous chapter continued to be made in all parts of England throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and much is still being made by the so-called studio potters. Among the more important later centres that have been identified with certainty, are: London (known as Metropolitan Ware)', Wrotham, Kent; and Staffordshire, where the names of Toft, Simpson and Malkin are the best known. A further technique, known as sgraffito and consisting of decoration incised through a coating of light-coloured slip to a dark body, was practised in north Devonshire and other places.

John Astbury and Thomas Whieldon of Staffordshire were the foremost potters in the middle of the eighteenth century, and their output comprised wares of all the types that were then known. In particular, Whieldon's name is linked with wares with pale-coloured transparent glazes including early versions of the famous Toby Jug, and similar types were made by Ralph Wood and his son, also named Ralph. Astbury is noted for pieces made from red clay, either engine-turned on a lathe or with white clay ornaments in relief. These two men led the way to the perfecting of lead-glazed pottery, a step which was the achievement of Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgwood was a good practical potter, he had been for a few years in partnership with Whieldon, but was a better business man, and his cream-coloured lead-glazed earthenware, known from 1765 as Queen's Ware, was so successful that it competed with porcelain, and was imitated not only by other English makers but also all over the Continent of Europe. The closest imitator in England was the factory at Leeds, Yorkshire, which approached the high quality of Wedgwood's products, but often used original patterns. Much of Wedgwood's creamware was decorated by his own men in Staffordshire, or at a. workshop he had for a time in London at Chelsea, but a quantity was sent to Liverpool to be ornamented by a newly invented process. This was by means of engravings printed on paper and transferred to the china article; quick, cheap and effective, it was typical of Wedgwood to test the possibilities of something as novel and promising. For the collector it is reassuring to know that the majority of Wedgwood ware is marked.

Early in the nineteenth century came the introductions of pieces decorated with lustre, both silver- and copper-coloured, and there was a great variety among the finished products. Silver lustre on a canary-yellow ground is the rarest, but silver in conjunction with underglaze blue, especially if the latter is a sporting subject, is sought after and expensive. Whole tea-sets were made at one period, each piece covered completely with a thin film of silver lustre, and they were a passable imitation of the real thing for those who could not afford to buy the genuine metal. Copper-lustred pieces have been made since about 1800 and production has been continuous for some 150 years; which explains why so many 'early nineteenth-century' specimens are obtainable.

Although creamware continued to be made, white-glazed pottery was developed from 1780 to compete with porcelain and was produced in great quantities by many makers. At first it had decoration printed solely in underglaze blue, but later developments included a wide range of colours. Whole services were made, and Spode, Wedgwood and Davenport (all of Staffordshire) were among the more prominent of the hundreds of names associated with it. The earlier blue-printed ware is very well finished and some of the patterns are most attractive; a few, including the willow-pattern, are still being made.

One of the most popular introductions of the first half of the nineteenth century was ironstone china, said to contain ironstone slag in its composition and certainly very strong. The heavy ware, almost unbreakable, was both cheap and showy. It was made in the form of domestic pieces with pseudo-oriental decoration in vivid blues and reds, and many of the big dinner-services are still being used. Sets of jugs, with handles in the shape of dragons, were made also and are not uncommon.

A style of decoration that is occasionally seen, particularly on jugs and tankards, is known as mocha, from a resemblance to a type of quartz of that name, and has brown moss-like blotches on it. The stains were made with the aid of tobacco-juice and hops, and doubtless gave pleasure to the potters making it.

Children were catered for from about 1830 with small plates printed with moral rhymes and other suitable subjects. Many were made in Staffordshire, but some came from Stockton-on-Tees, Co. Durham.

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 stoneware (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 model ling 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.

Queen Elizabeth I was petitioned by two Dutch potters, named Jaspar Andries and Jacob Janson, to allow them to settle and work in England, and it is believed that Janson set up a pottery in London in 1571. An early English dated piece of pottery now in the London Museum is a dish painted in colours with what appears to be the Tower of London, the date 1600, and an inscription reading 'The Rose is Red The Leaves are Grene God Save Elizabeth Our Queene'. It seems probable that this is of London manufacture but the colours used and style of painting are very like those on ware made on the Continent at the time.

A further surviving group of wares is dated about 1630, and consists of a number of mugs bearing English names and of shapes unlike current foreign types. Whereas these and earlier wares show, if anything, an Italian influence in the style and colouring of their decoration, the productions that followed were copied as closely as possible from Chinese porcelain; which by 1640-50 was coming to England in sufficient quantity to be a serious rival. Not only was Oriental porcelain being brought to England, but the other countries of Europe also imported it and their potteries in turn set out to imitate the newcomer.

It is clear that with pottery being made in England by Dutch potters copying Chinese originals and the same subjects being copied by the Dutch in their own country, it cannot be an easy matter to distinguish between the two wares. No English wares are marked, and it is agreed that only those of the seventeenth century of certain types and bearing English names or inscriptions can be accepted reasonably as originating in London. Among such pieces are a number of wine-bottles with dates from 1637 to 1672, and painted also with the names of wines: 'Claret', 'Sack' and 'Whit' (White). On these the painting is very sparse and the white body is often tinged with pale pink; a feature of tin-glaze. Allied to these bottles are a number of dishes, candlesticks, vases and other pieces, completely unpainted but of which many show the same slightly pink glaze. Also with this characteristic are pieces painted with the coats-of-arms of London companies, in particular the Company of Apothecaries with their motto 'Opiferque Per Orbem Dicor' found on shaped flat pill-slabs.

During the seventeenth century were produced a great number of large dishes, called sometimes 'blue-dash' chargers from their borders being painted with a series of dashes in blue. They are skilfully painted in colours, and the subjects on them vary from Adam and Eve to scenes of the reigning monarch and his family. Many are dated, but there is ground for viewing some of the dates with suspicion; one dish showing Charles I and his family is dated 1653 although he had died eight years earlier, and another of '1614' is of a type considered to have been made not less than thirty years after. No reason has yet been found to account for these discrepancies.

Until about 1660 London delftware was made at Aldgate or Southwark, but shortly afterwards potteries were opened in Lambeth, which soon expanded and became the most important in England. By this time some of the Southwark potters had started a works at Brislington, near Bristol, and within a further period there were potteries operating in Bristol itself and in Wincanton, Somerset, and by 1710 in Liverpool. A group of Lambeth potters was working in Glasgow in 1748, and potteries were operating in Ireland at Dublin (from about 1737) and Limerick (from 1762).

These various potteries not only owed their beginnings to the efforts and skill of men from their fellow-manufactories, but these very men did much the same work in their new homes as they had done in their old. The variations in clays, glazes and colours between one factory and another are slight, and the wares must often be apportioned to each factory on other evidence. Excavations made on the site of former potteries, and pieces that have remained in the hands of descendants of known potters and painters, and similarly documented specimens give a more reliable picture. Unfortunately, there is still not enough accumulated evidence to make certain identification possible in the majority of instances.

All the English delftware potteries in the eighteenth century copied principally Chinese imported ware, with a marked predominance of painting in blue. A quantity of commemorative pieces was made, and includes many recording coronations. Other inscribed pieces bear initials and dates, but rarely, if ever, was anything resembling a factory mark employed. Tin-glazed earthenware was enormously popular in its day as can be seen from the great number of surviving specimens, but towards the end of the eighteenth century it succumbed to the superior merit and lower cost of creamware.