These will be sufficient to show the range of years over which the Lowestoft blue and white porcelain was manufactured. That it was made to the close of the works there is every probability; but that it gradually gave way to a finer and higher class of goods is certain. Earthenware, too, of a fine kind, appears to have been made at Lowestoft, of which I have seen some interesting examples, so called, in various collections.
In the possession of Mr. Andreas A. Cockayne is a pair of remarkably good salt-cellars of undoubted Lowestoft make. The inside is painted with roses and other flowers, and the outside has festoons of roses and foliage, and on either side of each is a shield bearing gules, on a bend, argent, three leopards’ heads, caboshed, of the field; over all an escutcheon of pretence with the arms of Cockayne, argent, three cocks, gules. Crest, a leopard’s head, caboshed, gules.
Before speaking of the later and higher class of goods made, or painted, at Lowestoft, it is quite necessary to put collectors on their guard against giving implicit credence to all they hear in the locality as to the kinds of ware made at these works. I have seen undoubted specimens of early Worcester, of Caughley, of Bristol, and of several other localities, gravely asserted to be Lowestoft, and even attempted to be proved to be such by the very marks they bear. As a proof of this I may just mention that it is said the company did a large trade with Turkey, and the ware prepared for that market “had on it no representation of man or beast (so as not to offend Mahometan law), and at the bottom of each piece the Crescent was painted!” It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the pieces marked with the “Turkish Crescent” are the ordinary blue and white with the Worcester and Caughley marks, and that some of the pieces are the well-known “cabbage-leaf” and other forms of those makes.
Figs. 839, 840.
The great characteristic of the latter and more advanced porcelain made at Lowestoft, is its extreme minuteness and intricacy of pattern and beauty of finish. Indeed the decorations on many of the specimens which I have examined, are of a character far superior, both in design and in the exquisite and almost microscopic nicety of the pencilling and finish, to those mostly produced at other English manufactories. The borders are frequently very minute and elaborate, and the wreaths, festoons, or groups of flowers, are equally delicate in their proportions.
Some of the productions of the Lowestoft works are apparently painted on Oriental body, but there are many good examples in existence where the body is of Lowestoft make which are of very fine quality. The collector will be able to distinguish immediately between the examples painted at Lowestoft on Oriental body and those which were potted and painted there. Punch-bowls and tea and coffee services appear to have been the staple productions of these works, and, fortunately, many of the former, and several almost complete sets of the latter, are remaining in the hands of families in the neighbourhood, and in those of local collectors, who seem imbued with a truly laudable desire to keep alive the memory of what has been done for the Ceramic Art in their town. The bowls are usually of remarkably good form, and highly ornamented. They are mostly painted at Lowestoft, on Oriental body. Some of these, though not dated, nevertheless give collateral evidence of the period at which they were made, and become, therefore, historically valuable; as do also, indeed, some of the services bearing the initials, heraldic bearings, and monograms of families in the neighbourhood. A punch-bowl in the possession of the town clerk of Lowestoft, which is elaborately ornamented inside and out, bears inside a well-painted representation of a fishing lugger at full sail, within a circle, beneath which is the name of the vessel, The Judas. This bowl was made for the boat Judas, and was filled with punch and drank to its success before each fishing voyage, and at carousals at their end. In the same collection is another beautiful bowl, bearing on either side, within ovals, and surrounded by ornamental ovals, &c., portraits of the notorious John Wilkes, and another, with the words “Wilkes and Liberty.” The painting of these, as of all the higher class of wares, is very beautiful and, indeed, in some parts exquisite.
When writing in 1863 upon these works (and it must be borne in mind that I was the first to write upon them) I expressed myself as above. My opinion that some of the Lowestoft productions were painted there on Oriental body,—an opinion based upon thoroughly good foundation—has been taken exception to by a later writer (who has been indebted for nearly every scrap of information he has embodied in his work to what I then wrote), in no measured terms. I was fortified in that opinion by the judgment of the late Mr. Rose, of Coalport, than whom no man living had a more thorough practical knowledge of bodies and of all the different processes and phases of Ceramic Art, and whose opinion in all technical matters was sought and relied upon by all scientific men of real intelligence; and I am far from feeling disposed to give up that opinion at the mere dictum of a dealer. I have hesitation in saying that if a tithe of the pieces exhibited as Lowestoft were painted there (which I very much doubt), they assuredly were painted on Oriental body, for much of the ware now vaunted as Lowestoft is certainly not English.[106]
Fig. 841.