English Creamware Cornucopia Wall Pocket With a Cherub Emblematic of Autumn, Circa 1790

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Description

English Creamware Cornucopia Wall Pocket with a Cherub Emblematic of Autumn, Circa 1790
English, Staffordshire or Yorkshire, Circa 1790

This … Read more English Creamware Cornucopia Wall Pocket with a Cherub Emblematic of Autumn, Circa 1790
English, Staffordshire or Yorkshire, Circa 1790

This creamware wall pocket is press-molded in the form of a cornucopia and modeled in high relief with a naked cherub, or putto, emblematic of Autumn. The boy twists toward the viewer and raises a two-handled jar to his lips with both hands, his head thrown back beneath a mass of curling hair. The flaring mouth of the horn is molded with a foliate border of vine leaves and bunches of grapes, with a small Bacchic mask above the jar, and the tapering horn below the figure is strewn with flowers and a quiver of arrows, an allusion to Cupid as much as to the vintage. The lower end of the horn curls forward into a scrolling tip. The back is flat and glazed and is pierced beneath the rim for hanging; it retains an old twisted-wire suspension loop. The piece is unmarked.

Cornucopia wall pockets of this pattern were made in pairs, the companion showing a boy warming himself at a flaming brazier, emblematic of Winter. A pair given by Lady Charlotte Schreiber to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is catalogued as Staffordshire, circa 1790, and is illustrated in John and Griselda Lewis’s Pratt Ware, where the pockets are described as unmarked and possibly made at the Leeds Pottery. The Schreiber pair is recorded in the plain cream-colored glaze, as here; the same model was also issued with underglaze colors in the Pratt manner in the years around 1800.

Hung beside a mirror, a painting or a chimney breast, the pocket brings sculptural relief and the soft, warm white of eighteenth-century creamware to a wall; it reads well alone or opposite a companion pocket, and it will take a few stems of dried flowers as it was intended to.

Dimensions
Height: 9 inches (22.9 cm)
Width: 5 inches (12.7 cm)
Depth: 2 1/2 inches (6.4 cm)

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good

References
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, wall pocket molded with a boy drinking from a jar, emblematic of Autumn, Staffordshire, circa 1790, given by Lady Charlotte Schreiber, accession number 414:1166-1885 (Schreiber II 334), with its companion, Winter, 414:1166/A-1885 (Schreiber II 335)
John and Griselda Lewis, Pratt Ware: English and Scottish Relief Decorated and Underglaze Coloured Earthenware 1780–1840 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1984), the Schreiber pair illustrated
Leslie B. Grigsby, “Elegant Eighteenth-Century Flower Vases,” Incollect (2015), on wall pockets known in the period as “cornucopias” and “flower horns,” citing plate 18 of Robert Sayer, The Ladies Amusement, or, Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy (London, circa 1762)

Historical Context
Wall pockets, flat-backed vases hung against a wall or chimney breast to hold cut or dried flowers, were known in the eighteenth century as “cornucopias” or “flower horns.” They were made in England from the 1750s in salt-glazed stoneware, delftware and Whieldon-type variegated glazes before the creamware potteries of Staffordshire and Yorkshire took up the form, and they were sold in pairs, frequently as the Seasons, to hang either side of a mirror or picture. By the 1780s and 1790s the neoclassical taste brought putti, vines and Bacchic masks into the molds, and the same models passed into the early nineteenth century in the hands of the Prattware potters, who picked them out in underglaze color.

Ref: NY11271-iamx See less