POTTERY AND PORCELAIN
The Industrial Revolution introduced an era of mass production, technological efficiency, and mass consumption. One of its minor miracles was the perfection of a hard-boiled white ceramic that was within the financial reach of most of the population. Though hardly striking to the modern eye, the white ironstone plates pictured below ([Fig. 2]) are the result of years of experimentation by British and other European potters. In durability, purity of color, and cost-effectiveness, the everyday ironstones and granitewares of the late nineteenth century represent a triumph of western ceramic technology that has been little improved upon since the earlier part of that century. (See [Appendix 1] for a complete listing and illustrations of ceramic manufacturers’ marks.)
The impetus for this technological marvel goes back to the global expansionism of Europe’s seafaring nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the exotica brought back by early traders was Chinese porcelain, an impermeable white ceramic ware unlike anything produced in Europe. As trade with the Orient grew, so did importation of Chinese porcelain. By the eighteenth century, Chinese potters were regularly turning out blue-and-white “export porcelain” ([Fig. 3]) made specifically for the European market. East India Company ships were transporting it to England as “flooring” to protect perishable cargoes of tea.
Figure 2. British-made white ironstone or granite china, 1891-1900. All four plates are marked “MADE IN ENGLAND,” a convention adopted in 1891 to comply with American import regulations.
Much of this porcelain found its way to the American colonies. In the early colonial period, Chinese porcelain was a relatively rare and prestigious ware associated with the upper-class custom of afternoon tea. By the time of the American Revolution, both tea-drinking and porcelain had spread to the lower classes. When American merchants opened their own direct trade with China in the 1780s, they brought back large quantities of porcelain along with the more lucrative teas and silks. By the 1820s Chinese blue-and-white had become an ordinary household fixture and, with a concomitant decline in quality of production, began to lose favor with the American buyer. Very little was imported after the early 1830s.
Figure 3. Chinese export porcelain. These fragments are all from plates or serving dishes, probably imported before 1830. All are hand-painted with blue underglaze decoration. The piece on the upper left retains traces of additional decoration, including gilding, applied over the glaze.
Figure 4. French Bourbon Sprig or Cornflower porcelain, a pattern popular before the French Revolution. Other pieces of this pattern are on display in the Middleton House dining room.
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Oriental porcelain on the European ceramic industry. Europeans greatly admired the hardness, whiteness, and thinness of the Chinese imports, and many of the most important developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century ceramic manufacture resulted from a conscious effort to imitate these qualities. Soft paste porcelain, made by adding glass to the clay body, was an early attempt to reproduce the porcelain paste itself. The Germans discovered the secret of true hard paste porcelain around 1710 and began producing it at Meissen three years later, followed by the Austrians at Vienna in 1718 and the French at Sèvres in 1768. Early European porcelains imitated the Oriental in design as well as paste, but after about mid-century, chinoiseries gave way to flowers and other European designs executed in a variety of colors. Through the end of the century, European porcelain remained an art form available only to the well-to-do. [Figure 4] shows a French porcelain tea plate hand-painted in the “Bourbon Sprig” or “Cornflower” pattern of scattered flowers popular during the reign of Louis XVI. Probably produced in Paris in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, this plate was part of a large set of Bourbon Sprig china originally brought from Europe by a member of the Middleton family after 1820.
Figure 5. English porcelain platter, decorated over the glaze with the polychrome orientalizing designs favored by early 19th century British ceramic painters. This dish was also probably part of a large set, fragments of which have been found elsewhere on the Middleton Place grounds.
Little hard paste porcelain was produced in England, where bone china, a somewhat softer porcelain with calcined ox bone added to the paste, became a favorite material for expensive dinnerwares. Oriental influence on British ceramics was more immediately felt in the British decorative style, which through the nineteenth century continued to borrow heavily from the Chinese and Japanese. [Figure 5] illustrates an English porcelain platter decorated in the colorful pseudo-Oriental motif typical of early nineteenth century dinner services. These services, often made in stone china or ironstone, sometimes included as many as two hundred pieces to accommodate the lavish dinner parties that were the fashionable entertainment of the day.
Figure 6. Creamware sauce tureen, manufactured by the Josiah Wedgwood factory. One of the original 1780s Wedgwood designs, tureens similar to this one are still produced by the Wedgwood pottery in Barlaston, Staffordshire. Manufacturer’s markings indicate that this piece was manufactured before 1860.
A more significant effect of Oriental porcelain on British ceramics was the revolution it inspired in the production of everyday earthenware. From the early eighteenth century, British potters had sought to develop a smooth white-bodied earthenware that could be made from local clays to compete with the imported blue-and-white. The first real breakthrough in this endeavor came in the 1760s, when Josiah Wedgwood, the giant of British ceramic history, began production of a thinly potted pale yellow pottery known as creamware or queensware ([Fig. 6]). Dozens of British factories quickly took up manufacture of creamware, and it became a staple dinnerware throughout Europe and America. It remained a popular British and American tableware until the 1820s, after which it degenerated into a common utilitarian crockery. Known as “C.C. ware,” creamware finished out the nineteenth century as the cheapest of the heavy utility wares, used chiefly for such items as mixing bowls and chamber pots.
On the heels of creamware came pearlware, another Wedgwood invention that consisted of a slightly whiter-bodied ceramic, which, with the addition of a clear blue-tinted glaze, came close to approximating the pearly bluish white of Oriental porcelain. The development of pearlware, and the even whiter earthenwares that followed, ushered in the great British period of blue transfer-printing that lasted from the 1780s through the 1840s. The art of printing glazed ceramics with designs transferred from engraved copper plates had been known since the 1750s, but the more durable underglaze process was developed only in the 1770s—and then only in cobalt blue, the one color that consistently remained unblurred through the high firing temperatures required for glazing. Blue underglaze printing had been tried to no one’s satisfaction on the yellow background of creamware, but pearlware, with its faint bluish tint, was the first earthenware that was both hard enough and of a suitable color for the new technique. Despite the development of nearly pure white earthenwares in the early 1800s, British potters continued throughout the nineteenth century to add the blue-tinted pearlware glaze to earthenwares of many different compositions.
Early transfer patterns imitated the Chinese and were engraved into the copper plates in a series of deep lines, but a technique combining lines and stippling, which allowed for greater detail and shading, was introduced about 1810. With this and other developments, Oriental designs gave way to pastoral and architectural scenes—English, Alpine, Italianate, and American, among many others—usually surrounded by borders of English flowers ([Fig. 7]). In later years, many of these scenes were printed in various colors made possible by the introduction of new dyes in the late 1820s, but blue remained the most popular color through the end of the transfer-printing era in the late 1840s.
Figure 7. Light blue transfer-printed serving bowl, manufactured by J. & G. Alcock, Staffordshire, 1839-1846. Pastoral scenes like this TYROL pattern were popular from about 1810 through the 1840s.
Figure 8. Molded white ironstone chamber pot, probably American made, c. 1860-1900.
The dinnerware that pre-empted transfer-printed earthenware was plain stone china of the sort pictured in [Figure 2]. Late nineteenth century stone china, also known as ironstone, graniteware, and semi-porcelain, was not a new ceramic but a variant of the stone chinas and ironstones first produced by Josiah Spode and Charles Mason in the first two decades of the century. The novelty of the stone chinas sold after 1840 lay in the new inexpensive methods of mass-producing them, and in their hitherto unthinkable absence of painted decoration. Early nineteenth century stone chinas had been elaborately decorated with Oriental wildlife and transfer-printed patterns, but by mid-century it was almost all stark white, with only embossed or molded decoration. After about 1870, it was often produced with no decoration at all.
Stone china at its best was nearly unbreakable, and thus admirably suited to life in the still rough-and-ready American states. Like earlier wares, most of the stone china sold in the United States was imported from Great Britain. The fledgling American pottery industry did not begin producing hard-paste whitewares until after 1860, and throughout the nineteenth century American-made ironstone was considered inferior to imported china. Much of the early American potter’s energy went into the production of common utility items, which, like the probably American-made chamberpot in [Figure 8], were often unmarked to hide their domestic origins.
At the opposite extreme of the decorative scale was English majolica, a gaudily painted ware introduced by Minton & Co. at the 1851 “Great Exhibition” in London ([Fig. 9]). Early Minton majolica was intended as an imitation of sixteenth century Italian majolica and featured hand-painted romantic scenes on an opaque white background. The style quickly evolved, however, into a fancifully molded pottery decorated with a wide range of colorful semitranslucent glazes. Produced by a number of factories after about 1860, majolica was used through the end of the century both for inexpensive domestic items and for sometimes massive ornamental objects such as jardinieres.
Figure 9. English majolica, c. 1860-1910. This brightly colored ware was often molded into shapes resembling trees or other plants. The brown-glazed handle is from a pitcher apparently colored with blue, yellow, and brown.
Manufacture of European porcelain had not ceased during the years British earthenware dominated the American ceramic market, but the nature of the product had changed considerably. The French porcelain industry, in particular, had evolved from a restricted craft patronized by royalty to a number of independently owned factories turning out standardized dinnerwares for the public taste. These relatively inexpensive wares appealed to Americans as well as Europeans, and French porcelains were imported in quantity beginning around 1850. To Americans, the most prestigious French porcelain came from Limoges, where a number of factories had clustered to take advantage of extensive kaolin deposits. Of Limoges porcelain, the most highly regarded was that produced by Haviland & Co., a firm founded in 1842 by an American china merchant, David Haviland, to produce porcelain, specifically designed for the American market ([Fig. 10]). Cheaper French porcelains, often with no manufacturer’s mark, were sturdily and heavily made in an apparent attempt to capture the white ironstone dinnerware market.
Figure 10. Limoges porcelain, c. 1875-1891. The dinner plate at left bears the hallmark of Haviland & Co., an American-run French Company that produced porcelain especially for the American market. Three other undecorated plates, the least expensive kind of porcelain, were also recovered in the privy excavation.
Figure 11. Decal-printed Austrian porcelain, probably c. 1900-1918. Decal-printing, or decalcomania, was first used on ceramics around the turn of the century and is a common method of decorating china today.
Despite its popularity, French porcelain did not succeed in replacing white ironstone in the American cupboard. That remained for German and Austrian porcelain ([Fig. 11]), an even cheaper ware that began to enter the country in quantity around 1875, and in prodigious amounts after the turn of the century. Much admired for their thinness and translucency, these delicate dinnerwares easily undersold not only ironstone and the established French and British porcelains, but the then fashionable pressed glass tableware sets as well. Like most porcelains of the period, Austrian and German dinner sets were usually decorated with small sprays of naturalistic flowers. This design was made easier by the late nineteenth century development of decal-printing, or “decalcomania,” a process by which multicolored paper patterns are transferred directly onto the surface of a glazed ceramic. Decal-printing was first used on European ceramics around 1900, and it remains a popular ceramic decoration today.
Most of the popular Austrian porcelains were manufactured near Carlsbad in Bohemia, which after World War I became a part of modern Czechoslovakia. After World War I Czechoslovakia and other European countries continued to dominate the American porcelain market. Although American-made earthenwares and stone chinas had become a competitive force around the beginning of the century, it was not until World War II, and the resulting disruption of the European china trade, that American porcelain manufacturers were able to end the tradition of imported ceramics that began with seventeenth century Chinese porcelain.