1810s English Mocha Dipped Ware Pepper Pot, Ochre Slip, Herringbone Band, Regency

Details

Description

English Mocha Dipped Ware Pepper Pot, Ochre Slip, Herringbone Band, Regency
Circa 1810

This English dipped-ware pepper pot, made around … Read more English Mocha Dipped Ware Pepper Pot, Ochre Slip, Herringbone Band, Regency
Circa 1810

This English dipped-ware pepper pot, made around 1810, belongs to the colorful family of lathe-turned, slip-decorated earthenwares that collectors call mocha. The baluster body swells to a full, rounded belly and rises from a short waisted stem on a spreading circular foot with a molded edge. The body is dipped in a warm ochre slip, and around the shoulder runs a cream band carrying a rouletted herringbone of dark leaves inlaid with dark slip, framed between two lines of chocolate-brown slip.

The domed top is left in the cream body, pierced with holes for dispensing pepper and set off from the ochre neck by a molded ledge. The pot is filled through a hole in the underside, which is stopped with a cork. A single ornamental band on a plain colored ground gives the piece a crisp, graphic restraint, and pepper pots are far less often met with than the bowls, mugs and jugs that make up the bulk of surviving dipped ware.

Dimensions
Height: 4¾ inches (12.1 cm)
Width: 2¾ inches (7.0 cm)

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

References
Jonathan Rickard, Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770–1939 (University Press of New England, 2006).
Donald Carpentier and Jonathan Rickard, “Slip Decoration in the Age of Industrialization,” Ceramics in America 2001 (Chipstone Foundation).
Comparable: Skinner, Boston, American Furniture & Decorative Arts, sale 2985B, a pearlware pepper pot, England, circa 1800, of baluster form with an ochre slip ground interrupted by a central band of rouletting in black and white.

Historical Context
Dipped ware (“dipt” in the potters’ own records) was the period name for the lathe-turned, slip-decorated earthenwares made in enormous quantities by British potters from the 1770s until the Second World War, in Staffordshire and also in Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales. Colored slips were banded onto the pot as it revolved on the lathe, and patterns were cut or impressed with engine-turning tools and roulette wheels, the recesses often filled with slip of a contrasting color. The name mocha properly belongs to the branching, seaweed-like decoration introduced in the 1790s and named after the moss-agate “mocha stones” shipped through the Red Sea port of Mocha, but collectors now apply it to the whole family.

Inexpensive, cheerful and made for everyday use in households and taverns, dipped wares were shipped to North America in such numbers that they turn up on nearly every American domestic archaeological site of the early nineteenth century, which is why they have long been prized by collectors of Americana as well as of English pottery.

(NY9055/CUM) See less