English Creamware Pottery Toy Cat, Whieldon-Type Manganese Sponged Figure

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English Creamware Pottery Toy Cat, Whieldon-Type Manganese Sponged Figure
English, probably Staffordshire, Circa 1760–1780

This small creamware figure of a … Read more English Creamware Pottery Toy Cat, Whieldon-Type Manganese Sponged Figure
English, probably Staffordshire, Circa 1760–1780

This small creamware figure of a seated cat belongs to the class of inexpensive "toy" animals made by the Staffordshire earthenware potters in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The cat sits upright on its haunches with its head turned slightly to its left, the pointed ears pricked, the broad muzzle and lidded eyes modeled in low relief and the tail curled forward around the base, the whole conceived in a frankly naive, folk manner. The cream-colored body is dabbed with irregular patches of manganese brown to suggest a patched coat, with darker touches at the ear tips, nose and forepaws, all beneath a clear lead glaze that pools to a pale green in the recesses. The figure rests on a small mound base modeled as an outcrop of rock.

The cat is press-molded in two halves and left open and unglazed beneath, the luting seam running up the back. The decoration is of the colored-oxide, lead-glazed type associated with Thomas Whieldon of Fenton Vivian and his Staffordshire contemporaries, though here the manganese is applied as a few bold, spontaneous dabs rather than the mottled tortoiseshell of the better-known tablewares, which gives the little figure much of its charm.

At just over three inches high, this is a piece for a cabinet, a bookshelf or a bedside table, where it holds its own beside early English delft, salt-glaze or creamware, and its cream and manganese palette sits as easily in a modern interior as in a period one.

Dimensions:
Height: 3 1/8 inches (7.9 cm)
Width: 2 1/2 inches (6.4 cm)
Depth: 1 1/2 inches (3.8 cm)

Provenance:
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition:
Good antique condition, with a line on the back along the luting line.

References:
Pat Halfpenny, English Earthenware Figures 1740–1840, Antique Collectors' Club, 1991.
Leslie B. Grigsby, English Pottery 1650–1800: The Henry H. Weldon Collection, Sotheby's Publications, 1990.

Historical Context:
In the eighteenth-century Staffordshire trade, small figures of this kind were known as "toys." The word did not mean playthings for children but small, cheap ornaments, sold by the dozen to hawkers and at country fairs and markets, and set on cottage mantelpieces and dresser shelves long before the great age of the Victorian chimney ornament. Made quickly from simple two-part molds and decorated in a few strokes of colored oxide beneath the glaze, they stand at the opposite end of the ceramic spectrum from the elaborate porcelain figures of Chelsea and Bow, and it is precisely their unstudied modeling and spontaneous decoration that make them prized today as early English folk art.

Cats are decidedly scarcer than dogs, sheep or lions among English pottery animals of the period, and early examples in creamware with Whieldon-type colored glazes are rare. Such pieces were fragile and were handled daily, so relatively few of these modest, well-loved little figures have survived intact.

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