WHIELDON TOBY JUG.
Richly mottled and glazed.
(In the collection of Col. and Mrs. Dickson.)
WHIELDON TOBY JUG.
Fine translucent colouring and glazing.
(In the collection of Mr. A. H. Baldwin.)
Form versus Colour.—The salt-glaze potters, when they left their ideals of form and essayed to become colourists as well, made this attempt chiefly for two reasons.
(1) They had a very laudable desire to emulate the coloured porcelain made at Worcester, Bow, Chelsea, and Derby, which had become a serious competitor in their markets.
(2) They recognised a certain weakness in their ware in regard to its inapplicability to figures and groups. Unless the modelling is of the highest order the salt-glaze figures are insipid.
With regard to enamelled salt-glaze in general this is dealt with in another chapter, but it may here be remarked as touching the second point—the salt-glaze figure—that the salt-glaze potter brought himself directly in comparison with the figures and groups of earthenware of the later Whieldon school. Realising that if he must stand at all as a figure potter his modelling must be superlative, we find the salt-glaze figures, which are mainly small in size, taken direct from the antique or from porcelain models. But feeling the lack of colour he added touches here and there by applying reliefs of different coloured clays to heighten the effect. The salt-glaze potter rarely enamelled his figures in colours. In the illustration of a salt-glazed figure ([p. 351]) there are slight touches of blue.
So that in the contest between salt-glaze (the pre-eminent art of the Staffordshire potter in early eighteenth-century days) and its two great rivals, English porcelain and Staffordshire coloured earthenware, in other words—Form versus Colour—the first fall it received was at the hands of "Whieldon ware." The coloured and exquisitely clouded tortoiseshell plate, with its fine gradations of tone throbbing with colour, more than holds its own with the salt-glaze plate, even although its clear-cut arabesque designs and intricate patterns exhibit the excellence of its potting.
The Last Years of the Eighteenth Century.—Enough has been said to show that this typically English school had firmly established itself in Staffordshire. Whieldon, Dr. Thomas Wedgwood, Aaron Wood (block cutter to Whieldon), Josiah Spode the first, Greatbach, Enoch Booth, and many others, firmly adhered to their love of colour and their desire to see cream ware triumphant. The struggle for the supremacy of earthenware over English porcelain was still waging. And Wedgwood, with his marvellous invention of jasper ware and his equally stupendous innovation in the introduction of severe classic ornament, did not impose his style on all Staffordshire. We shall see in a later chapter how he had a crowd of followers and imitators, but at the same time many, very many, productions were potted contemporary with him that owed nothing in design to him, and on the face of them bear no traces of the classic influence.