EIGHT
Adam and Eve to Caroline, with Intermediate Stops
IT IS PROBABLY just as well, from an archaeological point of view, that few collectors are ever likely to come upon eighteen-hundred-year-old ceramic pots by stepping on them, and it may be equally fortunate for the landowner that the sector of the Medway marshes which I found so productive is now reportedly as barren as Roach Smith’s Otterham Creek. I am told, however, that one area still yields its treasures—in the shape of the bottles, stoneware jars, pot lids, and broken crockery from the London garbage used to build up the now-eroding Victorian strayways. Although, in the 1950s, I could see no merit in such modern junk, and loudly said so, my wife viewed it differently, and I more than once found her so laden with Victoriana that she could hardly stagger out to the Roman sites. Few people in England were then interested in ordinary domestic ceramics and glassware of the nineteenth century, but today they are, and such “rarities” as Stephen’s Ink bottles, the printed lids from pots of “Genuine Russian Bears’ Grease,” and torpedo-shaped mineral water bottles are to be found in many antique shops at precocious prices. A close friend, now a middle-aged timber broker, who shared many of our early Upchurch adventures has long since given up Roman archaeology and has turned his attention to salvaging Victorian artifacts from the large land-fill dumps that turn up from time to time on the outskirts of London. He is by no means alone in his unusual antiquarian pursuit; indeed, one of his principal concerns is to keep secret the discovery of a new dump for fear that hordes of competitors will descend on it when he is not looking. In England such treasure hunting can be tolerated by professional antiquaries on the grounds that Victorian artifacts are too recent to be worthy of scholarly attention. That is not the case in America, however, where the roots of many towns and states go no deeper than the mid-nineteenth century, and where archaeological sites of that period can be just as significant as are Roman remains in Britain. From Charleston, South Carolina, to San Francisco come hair-curling tales of bottle collectors tearing up private property, mutilating the remains of abandoned mining settlements and frontier ghost towns, all in search of Grandpa’s trash, a surprising amount of which turns out have been made in England. It is worth noting, incidentally, that when the object is marked with the country of origin, it was made after 1891 and so identified to comply with the McKinley Tariff Act. When the mark is even more explicit and instead of simply reading “England” it shouts, “Made in England,” it is also telling us that the object was made in the present century.
The ever-forward-shifting focus in the collecting of small antiques is occasioned primarily by availability, but specialization (like the fellow who collects everything ceramic in the shape of a pickle) often stems from reasons other than practicality. Some do so to become part of a fraternity, while others find their satisfaction in being different from everybody else. One would not expect, for example, to find many people who would be trying to create the largest collection of cow-shaped creamers in captivity. Not long ago, however, two such English collections were put out to pasture at about the same time, each thought to be the largest herd on record. One was auctioned off and the other was presented to a famous museum whose curator accepted it shortly before retiring, leaving it to his successor to find space for four hundred spotted, speckled, striped, and splotched Staffordshire creamers. For my money, two or even three can be interesting and mildly amusing, but half a dozen are altogether too many. My own ceramic interests are more catholic, for I have tried to acquire examples that illustrate the evolution of British domestic pottery from Roman times to the mid-nineteenth century. It is hardly possible to embrace a wider range, but at the same time it has a serious purpose, providing an opportunity to compare the craftsmanship of different periods and places and thus to single out the trees within the woods.
For the American collector there is much to be said for buying those wares that were in use at one time or another in his own town or state. Thus, for example, one can profitably pursue (as I do) examples of all types of ceramics to be found in Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This takes us far beyond the confines of British production to encompass porcelain from the Orient, stoneware from the Rhineland, faïence from France, earthenware from Spain and the Netherlands, and an occasional piece of pseudo-porcelain from seventeenth-century Persia. In the process we become armchair travelers in both time and space, following the trade routes of East Indiamen plowing their way through the Indian Ocean toward Madras or Batavia, checking their homecoming cargoes through customs and merchants’ records, pursuing their wares into the china shops of Boston or Philadelphia, and finally into the inventories of deceased householders in county court records. To people with no love for history, this vicarious voyaging will have little appeal; for my part, however, the romance of the past, however distorted and fanciful, can be a paregoric for the soul. Besides, one meets a surprising number of fascinating people along the way—many of them remarkably like ourselves.
Of all man’s creations, pottery is, as I have noted, among his most enduring legacies. It is also the scion of one of his oldest crafts stemming from one of his greatest inventions, the potter’s wheel. Thereafter, thanks to the cunning of the Chinese, the dedication of the Children of Islam, the artistry of the Italians, the regimentation of the Rhinelanders, and the celebrated shopkeeper reputation of the British, anything was possible—and marketable even unto the four corners of the earth. Just as the influence of Rome is recalled by its pottery found in the ground all the way from Scotland to India, so Britain left her ceramic mark around the world from northern Canada to southern Tasmania by way of Poona and Pretoria. But although Britain captured the utilitarian ceramic market in the eighteenth century (she never made much of an impression on the Oriental and European porcelain trades) and has hung onto it into the present century, very few of the technological achievements for which England is so often given credit were actually born there. Slipware techniques were borrowed from medieval France; English delftware was first made by emigrants from Antwerp; salt-glazed stoneware was developed in the Rhineland more than three centuries before its “mysteries” were unraveled by John Dwight, and the secrets of hard-paste porcelain were unlocked in Saxony while British potters were still hunting for magic ingredients. The fine red English stoneware so often attributed to the Elers brothers in the late seventeenth century (Fig. 7) was only a copy of the similar Chinese ware that had already been successfully duplicated in the Netherlands; even the Elers brothers themselves were less than true blue. They came from Amsterdam, David Elers having learned the potting trade in Cologne. Nevertheless, and due in large measure to a handful of Staffordshire potting families (not the least of them named Wedgwood), British business acumen, in step with some nifty potting and a good deal of political and military clout, gave England an edge which the Industrial Revolution honed to a sharpness that cut out the competition with surgical efficiency.
By the mid-eighteenth century British domestic earthenwares and stonewares were as well made and better priced than most of those to be bought in Europe, a fact not lost on the American housewife, who deplored the temporary shortages of Staffordshire ware during the American Revolution, and who stood ready and waiting to “Buy British” as soon as the shooting stopped. In the meantime she could hope for occasional shipments to America by cynical British merchants through the neutral Dutch. Then, as in the past, Staffordshire potters were willing to put pots before principle, and in their efforts to recapture old markets they were not beyond decorating their wares with near treasonable antigovernment and pro-American prints. Later unpleasantnesses like the War of 1812 were taken in an equally buoyant stride, and the cause of American freedom was espoused by English engravers whose burins created appropriately cringing British lions and spelled out words that even a modern radical might think disloyal. Much earlier, Lord Thurlow (afterward Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain) roundly condemned Josiah Wedgwood for printing portraits of
William Pitt in the bottoms of “spitting pots and other vile utensils,” voicing his displeasure in verse:
Lo! Wedgwood, too, waves his Pitt-pots on high!
Lo! the points where the bottoms, yet dry,
The visage immaculate bear!
Be Wedgwood d——d, and double d——d his ware.1
Throughout the nineteenth century British potteries made and decorated wares specifically for the American market, first with direct political or patriotic appeal, and then in the 1820s with transfer-printed American views on pearlware and on the white wares that followed it. Long sought after by American collectors, those prints included towns, bridges, state houses, and natural wonders and are most often seen on plates and serving dishes, though they also occur on pitchers, mugs, and chamber pots. The fact that they are still to be seen in so many antique shops is occasioned in part by the enormous original popularity of these wares and in part by the fact that the patterns have been reissued from time to time, many of them quite recently.
For the collector of memorabilia, commemorative ceramics provide an ideal field for specialization, and as a rule pieces recalling people and events of secondary significance are rarely faked or reproduced. Centennials and bicentennials are, alas, principal sources of trouble, for at such times anything remotely relevant becomes available in replica, “heirloom quality” souvenirs to sicken us now and sucker us later.
In England, Admiral Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar are the perennial favorites, while even greater heroes of a few decades earlier are barely remembered. The British public is not in the least interested in recalling the contributions of Frederick of Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. Frederick who? What Seven Years’ War? Nevertheless, in the late 1750s, Frederick the Great was Britain’s premier hero and ceramically remembered on wares from cheap white saltglaze to costly Worcester porcelain. Rim fragments of plates bearing his name, his portrait, and the trophies of his battles have been found on tavern sites in Virginia and on plantations in the West Indies (Fig. 64).
64. Press- or bat-molded, this cream-colored earthenware plate is relief-decorated around the rim with the slogan SUCCESS TO THE KING OF PRUSSIA AND HIS FORCES. The plate is underglaze colored in green, yellow, gray, and purple, and commemorates Frederick the Great’s contributions to allied victory in the Seven Years’ War. About 1758. Diameter 9 inches.
Better known in America as the French and Indian War, the long conflict of the Seven Years’ War resulted in the manufacture of a wide range of commemorative and souvenir items in other materials besides ceramics. Part of a copper-alloy shoe buckle decorated with the words SUCCESS TO THE KING OF PRUSSIA has been picked up from amid dirt disturbed during utility laying in New York. Another buckle inscribed LOUISBOURG TAKEN BY ADMIRAL BOSCAWEN JULY THE 26 1758 has been found in Williamsburg, recalling the capture of the fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia from the French. Other commemorative metal items included “King of Prussia” sleeve buttons and German-made tobacco boxes with cast brass tops and bottoms recalling specific allied victories. The example illustrated in Figure 65 depicts the British assault on Fort Royal that led to the surrender of Martinique in February, 1762, and is marked as being the product of J. H. Hamer of Iserlohn who was working there by 1760. In reviewing the history and scope of these boxes, Katharine McClinton has contended that “The battle scenes are similar and without their inscriptions one could not be distinguished from the other.”2 In this example, however, we can clearly see flaming mortar shells being lobbed from the British bomb ships into the heavily fortified town, and it so happens that Sir George Rodney, who commanded the attack, had brought three bomb vessels, the Basilisk, Granado, and Thunder, with him from England, and it was their presence that speeded the French capitulation. Thus the battle scene shown on this box would appear to have been drawn with the Fort Royal engagement in mind.
Souvenir tobacco boxes were inexpensive and were intended for a none-too-discerning mass market; for the same reason it is probably no accident that most of the “King of Prussia” salt-glaze plate fragments found in Williamsburg came from a tavern site. The same is true of clay tobacco pipes decorated with the Hanoverian royal arms, and of Rhenish stoneware mugs and jugs adorned with the GR initials of the Georges Rex. Throughout history, the lower social classes could be relied upon to be the most unabashed in their expressions of patriotism and hero worship. Few workers’ homes in Victorian England were without their framed lithographs or engravings of “The Queen—God Bless Her”; similarly, one is today more likely to see Old Glory decals and “America, Love It or Leave It” stickers on the bumpers of blue-collar workers than on the cars of management. Mercurial though these open expressions of affection may often be, they generally represent honest emotion—something that political and social expediency (disguised as good manners) has taught top dogs to conceal. Thus the street sellers who were the principal purveyors of commemorative wares sought their customers amid the crowds who waved the flags and cheered the heroes. Their wares, therefore, were not only cheap, but usually hurriedly produced to capture a short-lived market for which quality was less important than availability.
65. A German brass and copper tobacco box commemorating on its bottom the capture of Martinique by Sir George Rodney in 1762. The lid shows a spirited stag hunt of no historical importance. From the workshop of J. H. Hamer of Iserlohn. Length 6 inches.
The bowl illustrated in Figure 66 is a good example of an eighteenth-century, quick-sale, commemorative item and recalls the British Admiral Vernon’s seizure of Porto Bello in 1739 during the War of Jenkins’s Ear. The thin, lead-glazed earthenware (known as Astbury ware) is decorated with applied reliefs depicting the admiral, his ships and cannon, the city of Porto Bello on the Panamanian coast, and the following inscription: Ye PRID: OF SPAIN HUMBLeD BY ADMIRAL VERNON He TOOK PORTO BeLLO WITH SIX SHIPS ONLY. Besides leaving the “e” out of pride and putting the rest in lower case, all the Ns are retrograde, and the first and last letters of many of the words have been left behind in the molds. It is, in short, a very sloppy piece of work, produced in great haste to exploit popular enthusiasm for the admiral while it lasted. As it happened, Admiral Vernon was to remain a popular hero until his death in 1757, although his cantankerous nature, his outspoken attitude toward his superiors, and his tiresome talent for being right made him unpopular in government and caused him to retire before his time. Nevertheless, his memory lives on in four English villages named Portobello, two more in Scotland and Ireland (not to mention London’s celebrated Portobello Road antiques market), and on the sign-boards of countless English public houses called the Admiral Vernon. The Scottish village of Portobello would later become a pottery-making center producing wares that bear that name, as also do Staffordshire products commemorating the battle. It is just another of those quirks of ceramic terminology designed to unhorse the novice collector. To be correct, however, the commemorative wares should be spelled “Porto Bello” and the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish products should be written as “Portobello ware,” a small difference but enough—just as tin-enameled earthenwares made at Delft in Holland are dubbed Delftware with a capital “D,” while similar wares made in the British Isles are called delftware.
66. This red-bodied Astbury ware bowl exhibits sprig molding at its worst. Nevertheless, it is rare and historically interesting in that it commemorates the British sacking of Porto Bello in 1739. Diameter 5⅜ inches.
The Porto Bello bowl (Fig. 66) is a good example of one of the three ways in which relief decoration is created. In this case the technique is called sprigging; the wet clay is pressed into the individual molds and transferred to the already shaped bowl. Alternatively, the entire bowl can be pressed into a mold set on the potter’s wheel, as were the Roman Samian wares (Fig. 5). The third method, illustrated in Figure 67 by another Porto Bello commemorative piece, is known as slip casting, and here liquid clay is poured into a porous mold through which the water soaks, leaving the clay particl
es clinging to the wall. When left to dry, this clay skin shrinks sufficiently for the vessel to be lifted out of the mold. The “Venus and Adonis” fragment from the Upchurch marshes discussed in the previous chapter (Fig. 63) is a marvelous example of sprig molding, and by comparison the Porto Bello bowl regresses rather than advances by sixteen hundred years. Of the three techniques, only slip casting was new to eighteenth-century British potters and marked a major step toward quality mass production. Thus scores of salt-glaze Porto Bello mugs could be produced from a single matrix calling for no artistic judgment on the part of the potter nor any great degree of manual dexterity. The Astbury ware bowl called for both, in the placement of the reliefs and in the skill with which they were applied. The need for speed production being paramount, it got neither.
67. This slip-cast white salt-glazed stoneware mug also commemorates the capture of Porto Bello and provides a potter’s portrait of the victor, Admiral Vernon. About 1740. Height 99/16 inches.
Neophyte collectors often have difficulty telling the difference between relief-decorated wares that were press molded and those that were slip cast. The answer is usually to be found on the interiors, for in slip casting the even buildup of clay particles against the mold wall results in external convexities being mirrored by modified internal concavities, and vice versa. Press molding, on the other hand, calls for the clay to be smeared and smoothed into the incuse-walled mold with the potter’s fingers and who subsequently leaves the interior even surfaced, or, if it will not be seen, he may be content to let the marks of his finger manipulation remain. As the potter’s hands do not touch a slip-cast piece until it is dry enough to be lifted from the mold, he generally has little opportunity for interior manual finishing.
All the Best Rubbish Page 15