Wood & Hulme Garfield Pottery Fish Plates, Set of Six Aesthetic Movement Earthenware Plates

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Wood & Hulme Garfield Pottery Fish Plates, Set of Six Aesthetic Movement Earthenware Plates
English, Burslem, Staffordshire, Registered 1884

This … Read more Wood & Hulme Garfield Pottery Fish Plates, Set of Six Aesthetic Movement Earthenware Plates
English, Burslem, Staffordshire, Registered 1884

This set of six earthenware plates was made at the Garfield Pottery, Waterloo Road, Burslem, by Wood & Hulme, the design registered in 1884. Each plate is printed in brown and colored by hand with the same subject: a cod, its chin barbel just visible, swimming head-down through pink-tinted fronds of branching seaweed, the water suggested by fine horizontal lines in brown and pale blue.

The border is the plates’ real flourish. An outer band of ochre-brown geometric diaper encloses six panels on a bright blue ground, three of them filled with full-blown pink roses, buds and green-ochre leaves that spill over the inner edge into the well, alternating with three sprays of small blossom printed in brown and blue. Between the panels sit six square reserves, each with a stylized flower head on an ochre ground, edged in gilt. The asymmetric arrangement, the blue-ground panels and the diaper and rosette squares are all borrowings from the Japanese taste of the Aesthetic Movement, then at its height in the Staffordshire pattern books.

At 7¼ inches the six plates hang well as a group on a wall or stand in a plate rack or dresser, and they are equally usable at table for a fish or salad course. The bright blue panels and ochre-brown diaper border read against dark wood, painted paneling and the blue-and-white of Chinese export or Delft alike.

Dimensions
Diameter: 7¼ inches (18.4 cm)

Marks
Printed mark of GARFIELD above a beehive with TRADE MARK beneath, and the registered design number 8844 for 1884.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

References
Godden, Geoffrey A. Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1964 (Wood & Hulme, Garfield Pottery, Burslem, 1882–1905).
A Descriptive Account of The Potteries (Illustrated), 1893 advertising and trade journal, entry for Messrs. Wood and Hulme, Earthenware Manufacturers, Garfield Pottery, Burslem.
Birks, Steve. Wood & Hulme and Henry Hulme & Sons, The Potteries: A–Z of Stoke-on-Trent Potters (online).
Board of Trade Representations and Registers of Designs, The National Archives, Kew (registered design numbers 1 to 19,753 were issued in 1884).

Historical Context
Wood & Hulme built the Garfield Pottery on Waterloo Road, Burslem, in 1881–82 on what had been a builder’s yard, and presumably took the name from President James A. Garfield, whose assassination in 1881 was being commemorated on Staffordshire pottery in the very months the works went up. An 1893 trade account describes a sizable, modern factory: four ovens and three kilns kept constantly going, upwards of 130 hands, an output of about forty crates a week of tea, breakfast, dinner and toilet ware, the bulk of the work done by new machinery, and, tellingly, “many registered designs of their own.” The home trade was the principal market. Mr. Wood and his brother traveled for the firm while Mr. Hulme and his two sons ran the factory; when Wood retired in about 1905 the business continued as Henry Hulme & Sons until the early 1930s.

Registering a design with the Board of Trade gave its owner protection against copying, and the number was printed on the ware itself. Wood & Hulme registered this fish pattern in 1884, the first year of the consecutive numbering that replaced the old diamond registration mark. Plates like these belong to the late Victorian fashion for course-specific tableware: dedicated fish, game and oyster services let a household of moderate means set a table in the elaborate manner of the great houses, and the Staffordshire potteries answered with printed and hand-colored patterns whose naturalistic subjects and dense Aesthetic borders were within reach of the middle-class buyer.

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