Aesthetic Movement Black-Glazed Pottery Teapot and Cover, Attributed to Dudson, Staffordshire, Circa 1885

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Aesthetic Movement Black-Glazed Pottery Teapot and Cover, Attributed to Dudson, Staffordshire
Circa 1885

An English black-glazed pottery teapot and cover … Read more Aesthetic Movement Black-Glazed Pottery Teapot and Cover, Attributed to Dudson, Staffordshire
Circa 1885

An English black-glazed pottery teapot and cover of the Aesthetic Movement, attributed to Dudson of Hanley, Staffordshire, is decorated in gilding on each side with a bold diagonal band of geometric diaper panels framing a landscape vignette, flanked by stylized flower sprays.

The teapot is of tapering cylindrical form with a flat shoulder, a stepped cover with a knop finial, a swan-neck spout and an angular loop handle of rectangular outline. The red earthenware body is covered inside and out in a deep, mirror-black glaze of the type long known in the trade as Jackfield ware and marketed by the late Victorian Staffordshire potters as "jet" ware.

Against this dark ground the gilder has laid a broad band set on the diagonal, its upper and lower sections filled with a fine diaper of triangles and dots and its center reserved with a rectangular panel enclosing a picturesque landscape of a ruined abbey, its great Gothic arch and lancet windows rising above an arched stone bridge and a rocky foreground. To either side of the band are stylized flower heads with feathery petals and long scrolling tendrils hung with dots, the dots picked out in white enamel. Gilt lines edge the foot and the shoulder and run along the spout and the handle. The same composition is repeated, reversed, on the other side of the pot.

The diagonal band of diaper panels, the inset landscape and the asymmetric flower sprays are the Anglo-Japanese vocabulary of the 1880s, applied here to the deep black "jet" glaze that the Staffordshire potters used to give earthenware the look of Japanese lacquer.

Black and gold is the most adaptable of decorative palettes. The teapot holds its own as a single object on a mantel or console, reads well against both dark and pale walls, and sits comfortably with Anglo-Japanese and Aesthetic furniture, ebonized pieces and lacquer, or as a sharp accent in a contemporary interior.

Dimensions:
Height: 5 3/4 inches (14.6 cm)
Width: 8 3/4 inches (22.2 cm)
Depth: 5 inches (12.7 cm)

Provenance:
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition:
Excellent antique condition; the gilding remains bright.

Historical Context:
The Dudson family potted in Hanley from 1800. James Dudson (1812–1882) took over the Hope Street works on his father's death in 1845, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and again in 1862, and after building a large new oven in 1872 expanded from colored stonewares into the black-glazed "jet" or "ebony" wares that, together with the neighboring Ridgway Bedford Works, became a Hanley specialty of the 1870s and 1880s; the firm, continued by his son James Thomas Dudson, survives today as a maker of hotel ware. The lustrous black ground descends from the Jackfield wares of mid-18th-century Shropshire and Staffordshire, which were already being gilded by the 1750s, and it offered the late Victorian trade a way of giving red earthenware the look of Japanese lacquer at a fraction of the cost of porcelain. Teapots of this kind were made in Hanley and Burslem by several firms and are rarely marked, so the attribution to Dudson rests on the form and the quality of the gilding rather than on a factory mark. See less