The chronological table at the head of this chapter shows the great events that were shaping the destiny of this country, and, in politics, in art, and in letters, it must be admitted that the age of Anne and the first two Georges was prolific enough in incident. It was during the greater portion of the first half of the eighteenth century that English earthenware was finding itself. Attempts at classification nearly always leave the borders overlapping. In trying to gather in our net a band of representative potters with work peculiarly illustrative of this period which was essentially English—as English as Toft—but progressing towards something that should stand as worthy of our art, several great potters, such as the Woods, have escaped, and will be treated separately later. It must be granted that the influence of the Whieldon school was not obliterated even by the great rise of the classic school of design as exemplified by Wedgwood, Turner, and Adams. The strong English robustness and the national insularity of design never wholly died out in the eighteenth century. It was eclipsed by classic frigidities from across the Alps, and it suffered discomfiture from the rococo insipidities from France first naturalised at Chelsea and at Derby. But it lingered in the hearts of the common people like the tunes of some of the old ballads in spite of the fashions of Gluck and of Handel. Thus it comes to pass that, side by side with the Iphigenias, the Andromaches, the Venuses, the Minervas, and the other esoteric personages from among the gods and goddesses of Olympus, with their accompaniment of foreign fauns and satyrs, there were the very English (founded on Gillray and Rowlandson), almost Rabelaisian, grotesques in the army of Toby Jugs and the sporting, rural, nautical, historic, commemorative, and satiric jugs and mugs and figures, with English doggerel and with idiosyncrasies enough to make our earthenware essentially national.
WHIELDON WARE CAULIFLOWER TEAPOT.
With vivid green and yellow colouring.
TORTOISESHELL WARE PLATES.
Richly glazed, producing clouded and mottled effects.
(At Victoria and Albert Museum.)
Unfortunately in the early days it is impossible with any degree of certainty to assign many of these older pieces to any particular potter. The collector can only lament "the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattering her poppy," as Sir Thomas Browne puts it. It is without doubt rightly believed that Thomas Whieldon had a great and lasting influence upon the potters of his generation, but his own actual work has been swallowed up by the covering phrase "Whieldon ware," which, like "Elers ware" and "Astbury ware," has come to mean a good many things, and these are names of types rather than persons.
The forerunners of Whieldon.—It is necessary briefly to recapitulate the events immediately from the commencement of the eighteenth century to the day when Whieldon established his status.
There was a continuous chain of potters working in Staffordshire from the days of the Elers (1690–1710), to the period when Josiah Wedgwood became a master potter on his own account in 1760; he was then thirty years of age.