White Salt-Glazed Stoneware of the British Isles

White Salt-Glazed Stoneware of the British Isles

Diana Edwards and Rodney Hampson Antique Collectors' cudgel 45 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1 85149 4804

Hilary Young praises the way that the formidable difficulties confronting the application of mind of white salt-glazed stoneware have been tackled--if not wholly overcome--in this comprehensive research White Salt-Glazed Stoneware of the British Isles

White salt-glazed stoneware was individual of the most important ceramic proceedss of eighteenth-century England. It was relatively cheap to show extremely durable and white-bodied, and hence able to rival the porcelains imported from China--on the tables of the 'middling classes' at least. First made in England through John Dwight in Fulham during the 1680 it was then taken up in the 1710 by dint of Staffordshire potters, who soon after made the lock opener innovation of mixing calcined flint in roughly equal measure with white-firing clay.

This combination of materials was individual of two major technical unravellings that transformed the Staffordshire industry, as it enabled the large-scale production of finely pott teawares and tablewares--first in salt-glaze and subsequently in creamware--that won Staffordshire enthusiastic markets the couple at home and abroad. Manufacture of white 'flintware' rapidly spread to other parts of the political division but north Staffordshire remained overwhelmingly the greatest in quantity important centre of production.

Flint had been added to whiten and strengthen the clay material part but this fortified material also prov exquisitely suited to the slip-casting technique, which was re-introduced around 1740 This relied upon the use of hollow plaster loams and the adoption of of that kind plaster piece-moulds for casting and moulding was the next to the first great technical leap forward that transformed the Staffordshire industry, as it made possible the reproduction of manifold shapes in bulk.

Salt-glaze pudders were the first to full exploit this potential, most notably in their wonderfully inventive teapots of the 1740s-50 formed as camels, houses and the like, in which single can sense the potters' excitement at being liberated from the restrictions of the wheel. However, the widespread adoption of void moulds made factories increasingly reliant upon specialist modellers for their designs. like modellers often worked freelance, supplying identical protoplasts to a number of manufacturers--and this brings us to individual of the central problems that the authors of this volume faced.

Until freshly the study of eighteenth-century English ceramics has been largely driven by means of collectors and curators, who have attempted to date and attribute wares to specific areas or manufacturers, to document factory histories, and usually also, therefore, to link the surviving saucepans with the evidence for production. However, of all eighteenth-century ceramic materials, white salt-glazed stoneware is the individual most resistant to object-based research.

There are several reasons for this: firstly, it at no time bears factory marks and is comparatively rarely dated or accurately datable by means of archaeological context or iconography (and the evidence of at least single excavation suggests that designs might remain in production for lengthy periods); secondly, it shows hardly any of the variations in composition place in other ceramic materials and used to assist attribution; and finally, designs were rarely specific to a single manufacturer, as they could be bought in from specialists in the form of 'blocks' or 'case moulds' or simply copied from a neighbour or rival's products

Archaeology has been of more [i]or[/i] less help to the authors here, and, in addition to discussing the earthen ware of Dwight and the York painter Francis Place, they illustrate wasters from eleven potteries (five located outside Staffordshire, a disproportionately high figure, reflecting the relative ease of excavating single-factory waste sites). on the other hand these fragments show few of the diagnostic variations in design that collectors search for, and cast little light upon the huge numbers of saucepans that survive whole; and the overwhelming majority of the pieces illustrated here remain unattributed.

However, while the authors have met with a certain number of frustration in attributing wares, they have made great advances in documenting production and sale. The work contains impressively detailed chapters upon raw materials, the demand for earthen ware the making of salt-glaze (including modelling and decoration), marketing and markets in Britain, Europe and North America, and upon collectors.

These are proped by appendices of varying longitudinal dimensions one of which details the 125 manufacturers of salt-glaze identified through the authors. Interestingly, a fifth of these were outside Staffordshire, a statistic that is indicative of a major shift in our understanding of the subdue since the last monograph upon white salt-glaze, Arnold Mountford's Illustrated Guide to Staffordshire Salt-Glazed Stoneware, published in 1971 which focussed upon the Potteries alone.

A further appendix explores the documentation relating to the earthen ware of Thomas Wedgwood (eldest brother of Josiah), from which abundant valuable information on business practices, materials, manufacturing processe and sales is extracted; and other appendices generate price lists and name all known purchasers of the ware. The index is wonderfully detailed, on the other hand employs a system of cross-referencing that tripped me up when I tried to check whether the volume included an important and early concern to a partnership for 'flintware' in 1719 (given in Lorna Weatherill's of the highest order book The Pottery Trade and North Staffordshire of 1971).