Group of Staffordshire Figures.
MINERVA.
PARSON AND CLERK.
All marked Neale & Co.
TOBY JUG.
Finely modelled.
(In the collection of Col. and Mrs. Dickson.)
CHAPTER XI
STAFFORDSHIRE FIGURES
Early Period (1675–1725): Slip, Agate, and Astbury Figures—Best Period (1725–1760): Fine Modelling and Reticent Colouring, Ralph Wood the elder, Aaron Wood, Thomas Wheildon—Classic Period (1760–1785): Wedgwood, Neale, Voyez, Ralph Wood, junior, Enoch Wood, Lakin and Poole—Decadent Period (1785–1830): Walton, Scott, Bott, Lockett, Dale, and imitative school.
In attempting to classify the great array of Staffordshire figures and groups, extending over a period of a century and a half, no little difficulty has been experienced. The number of unmarked specimens is very great, and in many cases, owing to trade rivalry, models were so extensively imitated that it is impossible to say who was the first modeller. These Staffordshire figures, except in the instances of the highest modelling and restrained under-glaze colouring of the best period, cannot be regarded as ceramic triumphs. But they are highly valuable, although not from an artistic point of view, as illustrative of the character of the common folk in England, and exemplifying their tastes and their sentiments.
Ornament, even in the humblest articles of daily use, has its meaning and can tell its story, to those who read aright, of the feeling of the man who produced it; whether he took a pleasure in making the article, or whether he was a machine, human or other, producing only a thin echo of art. Practically it may be asserted that from middle eighteenth-century days to middle nineteenth-century days ceramic art was steadily deteriorating. Applied art had practically ceased to exist in the early nineteenth century. It is said that men's eyes were first opened to this fact by the cumulative hideousness of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and certainly a perusal of the illustrated catalogue of that Exhibition is a saddening occupation.
In the study of the china shelf this decadence must always be considered, and it is fully borne out by a close study of the subject of Staffordshire figures. Practically, the crude agate cat and the little mannikin of early days playing bagpipes found replicas in crudity and poverty of invention in the spotted poodle dog or the kilted Scotsman, the common cottage ornaments of a century later. And between these two dates, with the exception of an outburst which promised to develop into something really great and almost did so, there was, owing to want of artistic instinct and general lack of culture, a fairly rapid degeneration into the hideous nightmare of the Toby jug and all the awful insularities of the late Staffordshire period.