Figure 5. English porcelain platter, decorated over the glaze with the polychrome orientalizing designs favored by early 19th century British ceramic painters. This dish was also probably part of a large set, fragments of which have been found elsewhere on the Middleton Place grounds.
Little hard paste porcelain was produced in England, where bone china, a somewhat softer porcelain with calcined ox bone added to the paste, became a favorite material for expensive dinnerwares. Oriental influence on British ceramics was more immediately felt in the British decorative style, which through the nineteenth century continued to borrow heavily from the Chinese and Japanese. [Figure 5] illustrates an English porcelain platter decorated in the colorful pseudo-Oriental motif typical of early nineteenth century dinner services. These services, often made in stone china or ironstone, sometimes included as many as two hundred pieces to accommodate the lavish dinner parties that were the fashionable entertainment of the day.
Figure 6. Creamware sauce tureen, manufactured by the Josiah Wedgwood factory. One of the original 1780s Wedgwood designs, tureens similar to this one are still produced by the Wedgwood pottery in Barlaston, Staffordshire. Manufacturer’s markings indicate that this piece was manufactured before 1860.
A more significant effect of Oriental porcelain on British ceramics was the revolution it inspired in the production of everyday earthenware. From the early eighteenth century, British potters had sought to develop a smooth white-bodied earthenware that could be made from local clays to compete with the imported blue-and-white. The first real breakthrough in this endeavor came in the 1760s, when Josiah Wedgwood, the giant of British ceramic history, began production of a thinly potted pale yellow pottery known as creamware or queensware ([Fig. 6]). Dozens of British factories quickly took up manufacture of creamware, and it became a staple dinnerware throughout Europe and America. It remained a popular British and American tableware until the 1820s, after which it degenerated into a common utilitarian crockery. Known as “C.C. ware,” creamware finished out the nineteenth century as the cheapest of the heavy utility wares, used chiefly for such items as mixing bowls and chamber pots.
On the heels of creamware came pearlware, another Wedgwood invention that consisted of a slightly whiter-bodied ceramic, which, with the addition of a clear blue-tinted glaze, came close to approximating the pearly bluish white of Oriental porcelain. The development of pearlware, and the even whiter earthenwares that followed, ushered in the great British period of blue transfer-printing that lasted from the 1780s through the 1840s. The art of printing glazed ceramics with designs transferred from engraved copper plates had been known since the 1750s, but the more durable underglaze process was developed only in the 1770s—and then only in cobalt blue, the one color that consistently remained unblurred through the high firing temperatures required for glazing. Blue underglaze printing had been tried to no one’s satisfaction on the yellow background of creamware, but pearlware, with its faint bluish tint, was the first earthenware that was both hard enough and of a suitable color for the new technique. Despite the development of nearly pure white earthenwares in the early 1800s, British potters continued throughout the nineteenth century to add the blue-tinted pearlware glaze to earthenwares of many different compositions.
Early transfer patterns imitated the Chinese and were engraved into the copper plates in a series of deep lines, but a technique combining lines and stippling, which allowed for greater detail and shading, was introduced about 1810. With this and other developments, Oriental designs gave way to pastoral and architectural scenes—English, Alpine, Italianate, and American, among many others—usually surrounded by borders of English flowers ([Fig. 7]). In later years, many of these scenes were printed in various colors made possible by the introduction of new dyes in the late 1820s, but blue remained the most popular color through the end of the transfer-printing era in the late 1840s.
Figure 7. Light blue transfer-printed serving bowl, manufactured by J. & G. Alcock, Staffordshire, 1839-1846. Pastoral scenes like this TYROL pattern were popular from about 1810 through the 1840s.
