When seamen to their homes return,
And meet their wives or sweethearts dear,
Each loving lass with rapture burns,
To find her long-lost lover near.
These Liverpool cup-plates, by reason of their pictorial nature, have always been popular with collectors, hence the scarcity of them in antique and curio shops. Private collectors, too, seem loath to part with specimens of such printed wares. The glass cup-plates in native American manufacture are in no sense comparable esthetically with the cup-plates of porcelain and pottery of foreign fabrique. Still they are interesting historically. The majority of the glass cup-plates were crystalline glass, though some were colored—blue, green, yellow, brown, amber, rose, purple, etc. There were many glass factories in America in colonial days as well as in the nineteenth century, and American households were well supplied by them with cup-plates, although in design these were, more often than not, of comparatively little beauty.
Among the patterned cup-plate wares the collector will find, many varieties of the hundreds of varieties of the “Willow” pattern may with reasonable certainty be traced to their various potters; but this is a special study in itself, and one entailing the
surmounting of many difficulties. The amateur need not concern himself with the matter completely in order to enjoy the few examples that may chance to discover themselves to him.
The lovely dark-blue Davenport ware, with designs in the Chinese style, are worth looking for. Ware such as this is familiar to every collector and is coming to be appreciated more generally than formerly. From even a small collection of cup-plates much pleasure may be derived, and the collector need not feel that it is hopeless to start getting together examples of worth. If things are being picked up here and there on the one hand, it is true that, on the other, examples of cup-plates fully worth while are coming to the market as well as leaving it.