“That’s a good thing; I’ll have the money.”
The tureen has since adorned my mantel, and it might have been a part of the same set as the dish. I recently found at a Red Cross sale a little pickle-holder to match. I once priced a larger dish of the same pattern, but owing to the difficulty of getting it home left it, and the next time I was in that town it had been sold.
WEDGWOOD (See [Plate XXXII])
Josiah Wedgwood must have been a wonderful man, and I am pleased to have a portrait of him on a jug bearing his name on a scroll with the dates “1730 to 1795.” I believe this to be a Centenary piece, and as his works started in 1752 the jug will be about seventy years old. I have seen so much of Wedgwood’s Jasper Ware that I have refrained from buying any, but I show two small pieces—a really old pepper-pot and a sugar bowl (part of a set here)—which I did not collect. Early on I placed the teapot, sugar bowl, and cream jug in my china cabinet, but as so many visitors after running their eyes over my rarer specimens usually remarked, “I see you have some Wedgwood,” I put them out of sight. This Jasper Ware has had a tremendous sale for years and years, and is better known than its age. For these three things I substituted a Jasper spill vase, and many a spill has been caused by the knowing ones calling this Wedgwood, when it is not.
I have been lucky in finding some early specimens of Wedgwood—a plate impressed “Pearl,” printed but touched up by hand, a pair of tortoise-shell (back and front) plates with raised daisy and bead border. One plate, octagonal shape, cupids dancing in centre, with a remarkable light and shade effect, with oak-leaf relief border, and having a fine tortoise-shell back. All these are heavy and have “Wedgwood” stamped in large type, so they will date 1760 to 1765. These are followed by a Cream-ware plate, partly hand coloured, and a little later by a plate of a whiter shade giving a brown printed view of sailing vessels in harbour. These have the impressed mark in smaller type. Two little teapots, one black basalt and the other bisque pattern, about 1780, complete this interesting group.
Another excellent specimen of Queen’s Ware will be seen on shelf No. 1, [Plate XXXIII]. This bears the early large type Wedgwood impressed mark, and has the lug and feather border carefully painted in brown and red over the glaze. As my ten plates—two of which were given me—have cost me just half the price I was once asked for a single cracked tortoise-shell plate, I conclude I have been working on right lines.
PUZZLE JUGS (See [Plate XXXIV])
With the intention of describing to the reader the peculiarities of these jugs and the difference in the puzzles, I have just had the six filled with water to experiment with so that I might give lucid explanations of the enigmas, and I have been most successful—in making myself wet. That the investigation should be complete, I obtained the assistance of a young friend who revels in logarithms and abstruse problems, and as I noticed signs of his temper giving way under his many efforts to elucidate the why and the wherefore of these strange devices and their tricky behaviour, the enquiry is postponed sine die.
Of the two brown stoneware jugs the one with figures in relief hails from Brampton, and the other would have been made in some local pottery. The tall, fancy shape is a good specimen of those made at Leeds. The one with the pantomime group would be made in Staffordshire about eighty years ago, while the Harlequin jug was the work of Elsmore and Forster, about 1850. The white jug is the oldest of the tribe, and I should be surprised to hear of another like it being in existence. I fancy this to be the work of an industrious apprentice to show what a clever hand he was, and that the letters “G. B.” scratched on the bottom under the glaze will be his initials. I wish he had not given in his tally before he had added a date.