English Creamware Checkerboard Child's Mug, Circa 1820–1850

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Description

English Creamware Checkerboard Child's Mug, Circa 1820–1850
Circa 1820–1850

This English child's mug is finely potted in cream-colored earthenware and … Read more English Creamware Checkerboard Child's Mug, Circa 1820–1850
Circa 1820–1850

This English child's mug is finely potted in cream-colored earthenware and is of straight-sided cylindrical form. Bands of dark brown slip encircle the rim and the foot, each edged with finely turned lines. The central register carries a bold checkerboard cut on the engine-turning lathe: rectangular blocks of dark brown slip, in two sizes, alternate with the reserved creamware ground in staggered rows, their squared edges showing the precision of the machine. The mug is finished with an extruded reeded loop handle.

Dipped wares of this kind, the potters' own name for the slip-decorated earthenware collectors now call mocha, were made in quantity in Staffordshire and Yorkshire and shipped widely to America. A pencil inscription on the base records one such journey: the mug was given as a keepsake at Cape May, New Jersey, in the summer of 1904.

The graphic checkerboard reads as strongly now as it did when the mug was made. At under three inches high the mug sits comfortably on a bookshelf, a desk or a nursery shelf, and it groups well with other banded and dipped wares.

Dimensions
Height: 2¾ inches (7.0 cm)
Width: 3¾ inches (9.5 cm), including handle
Depth: 2½ inches (6.4 cm), rim diameter

Marks
Inscribed in pencil on the unglazed base “From Jack / Aug 20 1904 / Cape May”.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good

References
Donald Carpentier and Jonathan Rickard, “Slip Decoration in the Age of Industrialization,” Ceramics in America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2001), pp. 115–134.
Jonathan Rickard and Donald Carpentier, “The Little Engine That Could: Adaptation of the Engine-Turning Lathe in the Pottery Industry,” Ceramics in America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2004).
Jonathan Rickard, Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770–1939 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2006).

Historical Context
The engine-turning lathe was adapted for pottery under Josiah Wedgwood in the later 1760s and was soon taken up across Staffordshire. On dipped wares it was used in two ways: to cut a pattern into the leather-hard body, flood it with colored slip and turn the excess away, or to cut through a coating of slip to expose the body beneath. Checkered patterns were made with a pair of edge cams, one cutting a row of blocks and the other the offset row beside it. Rickard and Carpentier note that such simple checkered designs outlasted the more elaborate engine-turned patterns, continuing at some potteries almost to the end of the 19th century. The inscription gives the mug an American chapter. By 1904 it was already well over half a century old when “Jack” gave it at Cape May, the nation's oldest seaside resort, which had drawn summer visitors from Philadelphia since the mid-18th century.

(Ref: NY10894-iimx) See less