The finely potted baluster body decorated with a Chinese landscape in blue and manganese. The ribbed extruded handle with a pinched terminal.
Little more than sixty examples of tin-glazed stoneware have been recorded, mostly blue and white, the rarest being those pieces decorated in blue and manganese. It was an attempt to combine the durability of stoneware with the decorative potential of a tin-glaze.
Roger Massey and Diana Edwards have summarised the evidence for the attribution of this rare group to Liverpool (Massey & Edwards 2017). Sherds, now lost, were recovered from the site of Shaw’s Brow factory where the porcelain factories of Richard Chaffers and Phillip Christian also operated.[i]
Reinhold Rücker Angerstein (1718-1760) recorded in an unnamed pottery in Liverpool that ‘one of the workers has recently found a way of glazing the so-called white ware, which one pottery intends putting into production….. White ware is made in Staffordshire, the raw material consisting of half pipe clay and half flint, but there it is glazed with salt which is difficult and cannot be painted’.
Victoria and Albert Museum, gift of Mr. Wallace Elliot, C. 1434-1924
Michael Archer illustrates the other known example with a similar border in the Victoria and Albert Museum and discusses the history of its attribution (Archer 1997, p. 251, C.21).
Condition:
Long crack from neck extending 8 cm., chips to foot and rim, fine crack in base, no restoration
References:
Angerstein 2001
Torsten Berg and Peter Berg (translators), R. R. Angerstein’s Illustrated Travel Diary, 1753-1755: Industry in England and Wales from a Swedish Perspective, (Science Museum, 2001)
Archer 1997
Michael Archer, Delftware: the tin-glazed earthenware of the British Isles. A catalogue of the collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, (1997)
Massey & Edwards 2017
Roger Massey and Diana Edwards, ‘English Tin-Glazed Stoneware an innovation’, Journal of the American Ceramic Circle, vol. XIX, 2017
Price:£4,800
[i] Sherds illustrated by F. H. Garner, Liverpool Delftware, English Ceramic Circle Transactions, vol. 5, no. 2 (1961), pp. 72 and pl. 72