Chats on Old Earthenware

by Arthur Hayden

THE ENAMEL KILN.
Showing the ware after being enamelled stacked ready for firing.

By the courtesy of Messrs. Josiah Wedgwood & Sons.

Similarly, plain pieces of genuine Staffordshire salt glaze are enamelled in colours in order to enhance the value, owing to the fashionable demand for coloured examples. As much as £50 has been paid by an unfortunate collector for a teapot quite worth this if genuine old colour work, but unhappily it was, although fine old salt glaze, quite recently coloured, evidently with fraudulent intentions.

Staffordshire figures that are modern tell their own story, or should do so, to the collector who has ever carefully examined the potting and the glaze of fine old examples. Nor is there much excuse for the blundering collector who cannot readily distinguish between the crude modern Toby jug with its blatant colouring, so smudgy and smeary with black stains to impart age, and its genuine prototype.

There are some fairly modelled Toby jugs, of modern origin, one in particular seated in a corner chair, with a salt-glaze surface. Another "fake" appeals to the lover of the Whieldon style, and has a mottled base and hat. But they are, as the expressive term goes, "hot from the oven." The "Vicar and Moses" was so well modelled by Ralph Wood that it shared the fate of George Morland's pictures which were copied by his contemporaries. Ralph Wood's "Vicar and Moses" was copied all through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to-day modern fabrications repeat the same model ad nauseam. Sham Voyez "Fair Hebe" jugs, made for foolish collectors, are frequently to be seen and avoided.

Leeds ware has engaged the attention of the imitator. Some of the ware is made in Germany and is unmarked. But other modern productions exist stamped "Leeds Pottery," and are imitations of the old Leeds patterns. There is a tobacco jar in pewter having a shield with the Leeds coat-of-arms, and raised medallions of a ship and of the patron saint of the woolcombers. This jar has been of late years copied in cream ware, and with its lid with twisted handle it has passed as "genuine old Leeds." But it is nothing of the sort.

In general, earthenware comes off better in regard to forged marks than porcelain. In the latter, of course, it is the easiest thing in the world to add the marks, especially when most of them were painted. But in earthenware the majority of marks were impressed in the ware and this cheats the "faker" of his quarry.

As a matter of fact, the mark should not lead the collector by the nose. Before seeing any mark a collector should begin to know his subject so well that the mark is an additional piece of information which serves to confirm his previous conclusions as to the specimen under examination. An unmarked example may show every evidence in modelling, in paste, in colour, and in glaze, of having been made by a certain potter at a particular date. The only confirmation lacking is the mark. It is here that marked ware becomes of paramount importance for purposes of comparison. And it is better to have a genuine marked piece in one's cabinet, from a business point of view, than a genuine piece equally fine that bears no signature or trade-mark. But this craving on the part of collectors for marks has led in the field of china to a disastrous state of things; marks of one potter have been added to the productions of another, and no fabricated Worcester china is worth its salt as a correct piece of forgery unless it bears the square mark or the crescent.

Happily, in earthenware the question of marks only affects the ware from Wedgwood's day onwards. The finest specimens of earthenware in the noted collections throughout the country, of Elers, and Dwight and Astbury, and Whieldon, and the whole salt-glaze school bear no mark, for the very simple reasons that the old potters had no "marks." But they signed their pieces all over, and the touch of these old masters is immediately intelligible to the trained eye of the collector.