NOTES ON THE GROUPS
I now come to the arranging of the groups of the many jugs and pieces which I know are worthy of being shown, and I find I am up against the difficulty caused by so few of the makers marking their wares. The advantages of the markings on pottery are twofold. In the first place, you get a guide to the age of the piece, also an idea of the class of work the maker mainly went in for. Secondly, you can guess at the age fairly well of pieces made by other makers who copied the designs. By the Cottage Jug I know I have some Whieldon, but how much more I cannot say, so I shall confine my efforts in this direction to the endeavour to make the photographs a guide as to age, and I believe I can show that the period from 1750 to 1850 is covered. The style of the earliest specimens is so pronounced there is little difficulty in picking them out. The large jug with a farm-house painted on it bears on the front, “T. Clare, 1805,” which helps me to fix the date of others with somewhat similar handpainting. Then the illustrations give a clue, for instance, the Duke of Wellington and General Hill, Nelson and Hardy, Princess Royal and Prince of Prussia, Queen Caroline of England, pictures of the stage coach, prize-fighting, cock-fighting, the first railway trains, Disraeli and the Earl of Derby, Gladstone and John Bright, George IVth died 1830, Grace Darling died 1842, and, to end the list happily, a plate, cup, and saucer printed in green, “Commemorating Sir W. W. Wynn attaining his majority 1841.”
Photographic readers may be interested to know that I have used the same set of shelves for the pottery that I used for the metal subjects, but covered with brown paper for the former and white for the latter. A few of the light blue items are rather disappointing; these, of course, required less exposure than the darker colours, but I could not separate them all from the groups to which they belong. The groups have required six negatives, but they have had eight exposures. After the first six operations I sent the three slides to my developer, who reported Numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 as “quite good,” but Numbers 5 and 6 had “no plates in them,” so the result failed to reach the high pitch of efficiency to which I had aspired. The groups had to be rearranged another day, and the slides chanced to be filled that time.