The fine salt-glazed stoneware of Staffordshire which was made during the greater part of the eighteenth century is something in art of which the English potter may very justly be proud. It is remotely derived from the fine Flemish and Rhenish decorated stoneware, but the connection ends with the common qualities of being glazed with salt and of being extremely hard, almost so hard as to resist a file. But in the Staffordshire salt-glazed ware the body became almost of a porcelain-like quality. It was able to be made as thin as stamped silver, and in the thinnest portions of the pieces it is translucent like porcelain. Indeed, since the days of Elers (whom Dwight termed a silversmith) earthenware, or rather stoneware, took some of its details in form and in ornament from the worker in silver.
The applied ornament of Elers stamped with a brass die suggests the metal worker, and, with the models of the school of Astbury before them, Staffordshire potters followed the same methods. It is not astonishing to find the moulded designs with their intricate patterns in the newer school of potters of salt-glaze ware—which in its best period (1720–1740) relied solely on form and not on colour, being a dull, creamy white—emulating the fine work of the silversmith. It was only a natural striving in the new generation of potters of the Whieldon school, with fresh inventions in clays and glazes and moulds, to cast about them for better and worthier ideals than Toft had, and fresher models than stoneware Bellarmines which had been in circulation in the country since Tudor days.
Silver models provided many a fine shape for Wedgwood, his cream ware and his basalt teapots are bodily taken from Sheffield. But imitativeness has always been the curse of English potters. Wedgwood copied in jasper ware the cameo work of the classic world, and the whole of Staffordshire to a man commenced to pot on similar lines. Through the last decades of the eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth, thousands of vases and jugs were turned out as echoes of Etruria in Staffordshire which, as its name denotes, was but an echo of something centuries earlier. Bow called itself "New Canton," and Worcester slavishly copied Chinese mandarins and exotic birds, coined in the brain of some Oriental potter. Chelsea copied Dresden, and Lowestoft copied the Bow and Worcester copies of Chinese originals, and the list could be prolonged ad nauseam.
SALT-GLAZED LOVERS' TEAPOT.
In the shape of a heart. Floral decoration slightly gilded.
(At Victoria and Albert Museum.)
SALT-GLAZED TEAPOT.
In the form of a camel.
(In the possession of Mr. F. W. Phillips, Hitchin.)
Indeed, this curse lies very heavy on the collector who has to devote a great portion of his energy to research in order to determine who first made certain models. This, unfortunately, tends to divert the study of old earthenware, its artistic qualities and its technical triumphs, into channels more or less contentious. The literature of English ceramics is rapidly becoming like many of the editions of Shakespeare, where a few lines of text stand as an oasis in a desert of commentators' controversial opinions.