Chats on Old Earthenware

by Arthur Hayden

By the courtesy of Mr. Percy W. L. Adams.
From "William Adams. An Old English Potter."

The Caughley pattern, which some authorities believe was engraved by Minton when he was an apprentice there, was closely followed by Spode, Adams, Wedgwood, Davenport, Clews, Leeds, the Don Pottery, and Swansea. The differences are slight mainly in the treatment of the fretted border, either a lattice-work or conventional butterfly being used, and details of the fence in the foreground differing.

The term "Willow" is applied in a general way to many of the copies of the blue-and-white Oriental porcelain imported from China during the last half the eighteenth century.

But the "willow pattern," to which a story is attached, is of the same design as the Chinese plate illustrated ([p. 327]), which Caughley copied. This popular adaptation appears as a decoration on the covers of this volume.

Whether the story was invented by some ingenious person to fit the plate we do not know; but there is strong probability that this is so. On Chinese plates the dramatis personæ are missing. The willow has ever been a sad tree, whereof such as have lost their love make their mourning garlands. "I offered him my company to a willow-tree ... to make him a garland, as being forsaken," says Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing.

This is the love-story that is told concerning the "willow" plate. Chang, the secretary of a mandarin whose house is on the right of the plate, dared to love his master's daughter, Li-chi. But the mandarin had other designs, and his daughter was promised to an old but wealthy suitor. In order to prevent the lovers from meeting, the mandarin imprisoned his daughter in a room in his house overlooking the water. A correspondence ensued, so the story goes, between the lovers, and the lady sent a poetical message, in a cocoa-nut shell, floating down the river, that she expected Chang when the willow-leaf commenced to fall. By the connivance of a gardener, who apparently lived in the small cottage on the left, overshadowed by a fir-tree, the lovers escaped, and are depicted as fleeing over the bridge—the mandarin behind with a whip in his hand, the lady in front, and Chang in the middle carrying her jewel-box! The individual in the junk, higher up, is intended to denote that they fled to the island in the north-west of the plate. They lived happy until Fate, in the shape of the wealthy lover, overtook them and burned their house to ashes. But the gods changed them into two doves, which, of course, figure prominently in the design.

This tragic story of disastrous love has clung to the willow-pattern plates, and nobody can shake the belief of owners of indifferent specimens of middle-nineteenth century days that these plates are of great value. As a matter of fact, apart from the eighteenth-century examples, anything else is not worth the attention of the serious collector.

We have alluded to the historic character of the black transfer-printed ware, but sometimes similar subjects were attempted in the blue ware. We illustrate a dish known as the "Chesapeake and Shannon" dish, depicting the famous naval encounter between these two vessels.