Figure 11. Decal-printed Austrian porcelain, probably c. 1900-1918. Decal-printing, or decalcomania, was first used on ceramics around the turn of the century and is a common method of decorating china today.
Despite its popularity, French porcelain did not succeed in replacing white ironstone in the American cupboard. That remained for German and Austrian porcelain ([Fig. 11]), an even cheaper ware that began to enter the country in quantity around 1875, and in prodigious amounts after the turn of the century. Much admired for their thinness and translucency, these delicate dinnerwares easily undersold not only ironstone and the established French and British porcelains, but the then fashionable pressed glass tableware sets as well. Like most porcelains of the period, Austrian and German dinner sets were usually decorated with small sprays of naturalistic flowers. This design was made easier by the late nineteenth century development of decal-printing, or “decalcomania,” a process by which multicolored paper patterns are transferred directly onto the surface of a glazed ceramic. Decal-printing was first used on European ceramics around 1900, and it remains a popular ceramic decoration today.
Most of the popular Austrian porcelains were manufactured near Carlsbad in Bohemia, which after World War I became a part of modern Czechoslovakia. After World War I Czechoslovakia and other European countries continued to dominate the American porcelain market. Although American-made earthenwares and stone chinas had become a competitive force around the beginning of the century, it was not until World War II, and the resulting disruption of the European china trade, that American porcelain manufacturers were able to end the tradition of imported ceramics that began with seventeenth century Chinese porcelain.
GLASS TABLEWARE
Decorative glass recovered in the privy excavation covered a range of styles and manufacturing techniques spanning the entire nineteenth century. Most of the glass tableware, however, particularly the heavy cut glass, appears to have been manufactured in the antebellum period. This indication that the Middletons continued to dine off their pre-war finery until they left the plantation may be an indication of the family’s reduced financial circumstances after the Civil War. Only a few of the more representative glass tableware items are illustrated below.
Figure 12. Cut glass pitcher with applied crimped handle. Early 19th century, possibly American-made.
One of the more popular and long-lived methods of decorating glass has been wheel-cutting, introduced into England from Germany by the early eighteenth century, and used primarily on the soft but brilliant lead glass crystal developed in England around 1675. Early nineteenth century English cut glass, incised entirely by hand, tended toward restrained neoclassical lines, but the introduction of a steam-powered cutting wheel in 1810 ushered in an era of deep and extensive cut decoration. Much of this English and Irish cut glass was imported into the United States, but by the first few decades of the nineteenth century, American glasshouses had developed a reputation in the field as well. The cut glass pitcher in [Figure 12] dates from this period and is similar to pitchers produced in Pennsylvania glasshouses in the 1820s. The applied hand-tooled handle is of a type seldom used after the 1860s.
