SET OF STAFFORDSHIRE EARTHENWARE VASES.
Floral decoration in gold on rich blue ground. Flowers in enamel colours on white panels in imitation of Derby porcelain style.
(In the collection of Miss Feilden.)
We illustrate two finely-potted stoneware plates, by Messrs. C. Meigh and Sons, made about 1850. They are printed in blue with designs of English primroses twined with peacock feathers! Here is East and West in strange combination. Fortunately the plates are not in colours or the result might have been disastrous; as it is they are very pleasing for the blue is of a very excellent tone. There is nothing hasty about the potting; the finish and the minor details suggest work of the old days long gone. It is evident that in the treatment of the design the inspiration came from the Japanese potter whose influence was beginning to make itself felt in pictorial art even so far back as the middle of the nineteenth century. Whistler's peacocks and the dawn of the later æstheticism were at hand.
Nineteenth Century Commemorative Ware.—It has been previously shown how fond the potters became of recording events and creating figures of popular heroes in earthenware. The story is continued in the nineteenth century, which covers, one is apt to forget, the last twenty years of the reign of George III., includes the ten years of George the Fourth's reign, and the seven of William IV., commencing the Victorian Era in 1837 on the accession of the late Queen.
So that the term early nineteenth century is not the same as early Victorian; as a matter of fact a good deal of very good porcelain and earthenware comes well within the nineteenth century, but very few examples that appeal to the artistic collector belong to the early-Victorian period.
The nineteenth century as a whole was crowded with incident, and in the class of earthenware with which we are now dealing the record is a full one. From Nelson to Garibaldi; from Maria Martin the victim of the Red Barn murder to Moody and Sankey, the American revivalists; from Napoleon crossing the Alps to George III., as the King of Brobdingnag, looking at Napoleon through a telescope; from Burns's Souter Johnny to Dickens's Sam Weller; from punch bowls, inscribed "Rum and Water" and "Health to all," to figures of Father Mathew, the temperance reformer—all sub-heads are touched, and although the artistic may be absent the human touch is ever present.
There are jugs and mugs with a portrait of "Orator Hunt," with inscriptions "Universal Suffrage," "No Corn Laws," dating from 1818. A lustre mug has a print with a dragoon represented as riding over a woman, and has the legend, "Murdered on the plains of Peterloo, near Manchester, 16th August, 1819." The woman carries a flag inscribed, "Liberty or Death."
A puzzle jug of Staffordshire earthenware is inscribed, "Hatfield shot at George III., 1800. God save the King." The trial of Queen Caroline produced a crowd of figures and mugs and plates with portraits and verses. The Crimean War had its ceramic record. There is a Newcastle earthenware butter-dish printed and coloured, with an English soldier greeting a French soldier, and motto, "May they ever be united."