Vintage Stoneware Small Pitcher Made in England British Art Pottery
A-Z of Ceramics
As peculiar as some of the pieces themselves, the language of ceramics is vast and draws from a global lexicon. Peruse our A-Z to find out most some of the terms yous might discover in our incredible galleries.
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A is for A-marked
Ceramic objects are often identified by their marks. Marks like the Chelsea anchor or the crossed-swords of Meissen are well known (and were often pirated), while the significance of others is uncertain.
One such mysterious marker is the capital A found on a rare group of 18th-century British porcelains. One time considered Italian, the group has been tentatively associated with small factories or experimental works at Birmingham, Kentish Town in London, and Gorgie well-nigh Edinburgh. The most recent theory is that they were made with clay imported from Virginia by 2 of the partners in the Bow porcelain factory. If so, the 'A' might refer to George Arnold, a sleeping partner in the firm.
B is for biscuit
'Biscuit' comes from the French 'bis-cuite', significant 'twice baked', although the term is most commonly used for unglazed wares that have had only a single firing. This is because the offset 'blistering' unsaid in its original usage would have been to fuse raw materials, not for firing the shaped ware.
Unless made from materials that vitrify at loftier kiln temperatures, biscuit ceramics are porous. To make them impervious to liquids, they require a glaze and a second ('glost') firing. But sometimes porcelain figures and ornamental wares are left in the unglazed biscuit state for aesthetic reasons.
These porcelain figures were much more than expensive than glazed and enamelled versions, equally there was no covering to mask imperfections. Although white, porous and difficult to clean, beige porcelain was fashionable for the ornament of dining tables in 18th-century France and Great britain.
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C is for China
The word 'red china' was used in 17th-century Great britain to describe porcelain imported from China. At that fourth dimension Europeans were unable to industry porcelain, which was an expensive and highly prized material.
Equally the passion for collecting china intensified, greater efforts were made to detect the secrets of its manufacture. The first passable substitutes to be made in England appeared in the 1740s, and these were likewise called 'china-wares' to distinguish them from ordinary earthenwares.
Today, for many people 'china' is a catch-all term for ceramic tea-things, but in industrial circles it means os china, a class of porcelain that includes bone ash in its composition.
Animal os ash was first added to porcelain at the Bow factory in the 1740s, but its employ in a hard-paste mixture was favoured past Josiah Spode in the 1790s, just as the importation of Chinese porcelain ceased to be significant.
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D is for delftware
For most people, 'delftware' conjures up images of the blue and white pottery made in the Dutch town of Delft. The term in fact describes all 'tin can-glazed earthenwares' made in the Netherlands and the British Isles. Tin-glazed earthenware, which normally has a white glaze and painted decoration, has been produced in many countries and has many different names.
Italian tin can-glazed pottery is known every bit maiolica. It was a popular product and traded widely. By the 14th century, fleets of Venetian ships appeared in the English Aqueduct every year, carrying cargoes of maiolica spring for England, France and the Netherlands. These ships were known every bit Flanders galleys, and it is doubtless from this name that 'galleyware' the original English term for can-glazed earthenware, derives.
Although production of tin-glazed earthenware began in the netherlands and England in the 16th century, it was not actually made in Delft until effectually 1600. By the late 17th century, Delft had get the nigh famous heart of production. Variations on the name 'delftware' have since become common in Britain for both English and Dutch pottery of this type. Wares known to take been made in the town itself are at present just chosen 'Delft'.
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East is for encaustic
The term encaustic, literally meaning 'burnt in', is given to several quite different artistic processes. In ceramics it usually describes objects, oftentimes tiles, with decoration inlaid into their surface using clay of a contrasting color. Wedgwood, however, likewise used the term to describe Greek-style vases with decoration painted onto their surface using coloured clay slip.
Medieval inlaid tiles were decorated by stamping the clay with a carved wooden block. The indentations were then filled with white pipe clay. In the 19th century, these tiles were called 'encaustic'. Today the term ordinarily refers to Victorian inlaid tiles. These were made in a similar way, but instead of stamping the design into the tile, the clay was pressed into a mould with the design in relief at the bottom. One time the tile was removed from the mould, the indentations could exist filled with a contrasting clay. Mechanised processes using powdered clay to form the tile body and inlaid pattern were also used by some manufacturers.
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F is for flatback
This is the word used for cheap earthenware ornaments modelled only on the front and slim enough to fit the narrowest shelf. Staffordshire potters used the word 'images' for these ceramics.
In the grim and troubled mid 19th century, the working population of Great britain was so hungry for folk heroes that fifty-fifty a small-fourth dimension (but particularly savage) 18th-century highwayman similar Dick Turpin could exist raised in the public imagination to the romantic status of Robin Hood. His figure was frequently paired with that of Tom King, some other highwayman whom Turpin shot and killed by error. It is perhaps doubtful whether Rex would have wished to exist immortalised aslope his killer!
Another popular hero, forgotten today, was Tom Sayers, a Pimlico prize-fighter whose blank-fist fight with the New-Yorker John Heenan at Farnborough in 1860 attracted a crowd of over 12,000. In the quaternary of 37 rounds Sayers dislocated his arm, while the American was virtually blind past the time the fight was declared a draw after two hours and six minutes.
Huge numbers of these imaginary portraits were made to adorn apprehensive cottage mantelpieces. They seem now to have a artless charm, perhaps considering they were actually fabricated by children, who produced upwards to 400 small-scale figures a mean solar day for as little as two shillings (10p) a week.
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G is for Grand feu
'K feu', simply meaning 'loftier temperature firing', is a term peculiarly applied to tin can-glazed earthenwares (or 'faïence') made in French republic. It was used in contrast to an alternative method of decoration, known every bit 'petit feu'.
'Grand feu' decoration relied on a limited range of colours that could exist painted onto the raw coat and fired together. Often boldly painted, the result could exist both highly decorative and very economical. 'Petit feu' ornament had an expensive extra enamel firing, which could only exist justified when faience was attempting to rival porcelain. As tough porcelain and imported printed English language earthenwares became readily available in France towards the end of the 18th century, faience declined until simply reproductions and souvenirs continued to be fabricated.
French creative person potters of the late 19th century too used the term to depict stonewares or porcelains with brilliant merely unpredictable red flambé glazes based on oriental prototypes. These pioneers were the first true studio potters.
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H is for hard-paste
Difficult-paste or 'truthful' porcelain is so-called because its raw materials and firing temperature (1200°C to 1450°C) result in a very hard, strong body that can withstand boiling water. Its other desirable qualities are whiteness, translucency, resonance and non-porosity. Its moulded details are often crisper than those in other wares.
The recipe and firing technique was invented in the 6th century in Red china, where in that location was plenty of kaolin (prc clay) and petuntse (fusible feldspar stone), its two ingredients. China kept the recipe and method of product a closely guarded secret while Europe struggled to discover the ingredients. In 1709, after years of inquiry, the physicist E.Westward. von Tschirnhaus and the alchemist J.F. Böttger produced hard-paste porcelain, leading to the foundation of the Saxon royal factory at Meissen in the post-obit year. Böttger had been near kept a prisoner by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, until he discovered the great secret or 'arcanum'. Similar the Chinese, the Meissen manufactory hoped to go on the secret to themselves, but industrial espionage past rival 'arcanists' led to the dissemination of this 'hush-hush knowledge'.
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I is for Iznik
The small rural town of Iznik nestles picturesquely on a lakeside in Western Anatolia. Here in the early 16th century an 'Purple ware' was made for the Istanbul court of the Ottoman Sultan - the richest, most powerful monarch in Europe. European collectors in the mid 19th century thought that such fine pottery could only have been made in Persia (or Iran, as it is today). They saw the Persians as the only truly 'artistic' race of the Islamic globe, and the 'artless' Arabs and Turks as barbarian nomads.
Equally more information became available, it was suggested that these wares were fabricated in Damascus or the island of Rhodes, where much subsequently Iznik ware was found. Convoluted stories explained the presence of Persian potters in these distant lands, and it was argued that 'Rhodian' wares were made past shipwrecked Persian sailors. Only in the 1920s did scholars have that Iznik ware was Ottoman, giving due recognition at terminal to the Turkish potters for some of the globe's most beautiful and striking designs.
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J is for jiggers and jolleys
Machines called jiggers and jolleys are used to make tableware in ceramics factories. The derivation of these strange names is unclear, though the word 'jigger' is really used to describe all kinds of quite different mechanical devices used in many different occupations, including billiards, golf and printing.
By the 1880s, the machines were in regular use in the potteries. Their arrival was not welcomed by the workforce. Men in particular were opposed to their introduction, simply found that if they refused to work them, women were employed in their place. The ii devices are similar, both consisting of a profile which is used in conjunction with a plaster mould fitted to a rotating head. This can be seen in the diagram on the left.
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K is for Kakiemon
Kakiemon is the name given to a class of finely potted Japanese porcelains painted in a distinctive palette and repertoire of designs, which were made from the tardily 17th century and which take been associated with the Kakiemon family of potters. By extension it is too applied to the copies of these patterns made in 18th-century Europe, notably at Meissen, Chantilly, Chelsea and Bow.
The British versions were once thought to accept been made after Meissen prototypes, simply it now seems many were copied from Japanese originals. The merchandise in these Japanese porcelains was at its tiptop in the beginning ii decades of the 18th century, and many inventories comprise references to 'old Japan', pregnant these porcelains.
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L is for lustre
Lustre is a very sophisticated decorative technique in which pigment containing oxides of copper and silver is painted onto a fired glazed pot. The pot is then given a low-temperature firing in which the air-supply is restricted. This produces carbon monoxide, which hungrily extracts oxygen from every available source, forming the more stable carbon dioxide. In this reducing atmosphere, the pigments are stripped of oxygen and reduced to a microscopically thin layer of metal bonded to the surface of the glaze. The lustre thus shines with metallic glints and mother-of-pearl reflections.
Beginning seen on glass in Arab republic of egypt in the 8th century, lustre production moved to Republic of iraq, back to Egypt, then, in the 12th century, to Syrian arab republic and Iran. Before long after, it arrived in Spain, where production continued into the 20th century.
Truthful reduced lustre should not exist confused with the less demanding and more than compatible industrial technique invented in the early 19th century. In the late 19th century, true reduced lustre became a passion in one case once more among collectors and some art-potters.
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M is for Maiolica
The term 'maiolica' was used in 15th-century Italy for lustrewares imported from Espana. It is unremarkably said that the proper noun derives from Majorca, an isle that played an important part in this trade. Recently it's been argued that the name derives from 'obra de Mallequa', the term for lustred ware made in Valencia under the influence of Moorish craftsmen from Malaga. The name was presently adopted for Italian-made lustre pottery copying Spanish examples, and during the 16th century, its meaning shifted to include all tin-glazed earthenware.
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, Italian Renaissance maiolica became increasingly popular amid collectors and museums in Britain. At first information technology was referred to, romantically, as Raffaelle ware or Urbino ware, but soon besides with the anglicised term 'majolica'.
In the mid 19th century, the term 'majolica ware' was also used by the Minton factory for their newly introduced, painted tin-glazed earthenwares. But at the Great Exhibition of 1851 Minton launched colourful lead-glazed earthenwares in neo-Renaissance or naturalistic forms called 'Palissy-ware'. Gradually the championship 'Palissy' was dropped and by the 1880s the proper noun 'majolica' was instead commonly used to describe this popular colourful ware.
In the early on 1870s, the curators of the South Kensington Museum returned to the original Italian 'maiolica' with an 'i' to draw all Italian tin-glazed earthenware, doubtless to stress the Italian pronunciation and to avoid defoliation with contemporary majolica.
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N is for Nobody
Ceramic figures of Nobody combine a surprisingly aboriginal joke with a uniquely English pun. The joke concerns the deprival of guilt: 'Who did that?' 'Nobody!' He is seen as always innocent, yet always blamed for others' deeds. Homer's Odysseus escaped Polyphemus by giving his name as 'No-human being'. A medieval monk created a mock-saint (Saint Nemo) by finding all references to 'nemo' in the Bible e.yard. 'Nemo deum vidit' (No-one has seen God).
In 16th-century Germany, 'Niemand' was blamed by bad servants for household breakages. Moralists took this over, arguing that individuals were responsible for the country of the Church and Society, and Protestant Reformers took this notion to England.
The pun 'No...body' is non possible in other European languages, so only ceramics destined for the British market draw a human whose legs join straight onto his caput. He comes from a 1606 woodcut frontispiece to the play 'Nobody and Somebody', which Shakespeare mentions in 'The Storm'.
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O is for oxidation
In addition to irresolute clay into a hard ceramic material, the first firing of a pot transforms its advent, dramatically altering colours and textures. The challenge to the potter is to control the firing conditions to achieve the desired results. The two most central aspects of firing are the temperature and the amount of oxygen in the kiln temper.
Altering the amount of oxygen in the kiln tin can result in startling furnishings. The very same glaze pigments may change entirely, depending on whether the kiln temper is rich in oxygen (favouring 'oxidation' reactions) or starved of oxygen (favouring chemical 'reduction'). In making the pots illustrated below, the same form of copper oxide was added to the glazes. Merely at a critical moment during the firing of the cherry vase, the kiln was starved of oxygen, resulting in this rich and luscious result.
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P is for Palissy
Bernard Palissy (built-in about 1509/10, died nigh 1585) was a colourful and romantic character. Although patronised by the Catholic nobility, he was a militant Huguenot (Protestant) who finally perished in the Guardhouse. In the 19th century he was revered as both a Protestant martyr and as a primary potter. In the 1850s parts of Palissy'south fabled rustic grotto made for Catherine de Medici were found during excavations for the Louvre.
By using revolutionary colours, and moulds cast from actual animals and plants, Palissy had invented an entirely new type of ware. He was a bully self-publicist and wrote dramatic accounts of his struggles to develop clays and glazes, an obsession that condemned his family to poverty.
His work was ofttimes copied, from the 17th century right upward to the 19th century. This makes the identification of genuine Palissy wares very difficult. Unmarked Palissy-type ceramics made past unidentified workshops in the 17th and 18th centuries are sometimes designated 'school, or follower, of Palissy'. In the 19th century historicising French potters such as Charles-Jean Avisseau (1796-1861) and Joseph Landais (1800-83) made and signed similar wares.
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Q is for Queen's Ware
Foam-coloured earthenwares, containing a combination of whitish clays and calcined flintstone, were fabricated in Staffordshire from the 1740s. Josiah Wedgwood - whose extraordinary skills as a ceramic technologist were very well-nigh matched by his talents as a salesman and entrepreneur - made various improvements to the material during the 1760s.
Following his date as Potter to Queen Charlotte in 1766, he named his improved creamware 'Queen'south Ware'. This did much to ensure the fashionable status of his pottery. Merely as the term rapidly became the generic name for creamware, it was also widely used to promote the products of his competitors. Forth with transfer press and the os cathay formula, creamware was one of the major technical advances in ceramics that the British tin lay claim to.
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R is for repairers
The 'repairers' working in the 18th-century British ceramics industry did not, as their name suggests, mend or rivet broken ceramics. Rather, they were the skilled craftsmen responsible for assembling figures and certain wares from the constituent parts formed in plaster piece-moulds. They likewise cleaned up mould seam-lines, incised or sharpened upwards such details as facial features and wearable accessories, and added small hand-modelled or separately cast components.
Repairers were responsible for many of the variations constitute in sculptural porcelain pieces, equally here. Modelling and designing announced to have been overlapping areas of activity in the 18th-century ceramic industry; merely in assemblages of this type - which tin can bring together thrown shapes, standard moulded components, hand-pierced work and parts modelled by hand - the distinctions between modelling, repairing and designing become completely blurred.
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S is for slip
'Slip' is clay suspended in water to class a liquid of creamy consistency. Many 'industrial' and modern ceramics are formed entirely from slip poured into plaster moulds.
Since effectually 1900, however, the term 'slipware' has been applied specifically to slip-busy ware. These are pots that have been coated in sideslip, accept applied sideslip decoration, or a combination of both. The dirt used for the slip is commonly in a contrasting colour or colours to that of the ceramic body. Slip decoration comprises a variety of techniques such as painting, trailing or 'jewelling' or inlaying into relief designs.
By applying one or sometimes 2 coats of slip, the potter can decorate the pot in diverse ways. Incision (as well known equally 'sgraffito') involves cutting through the slip to reveal the body beneath. Combing or feathering means dragging a serrated tool through the wet slip coats. Marbling is created by agitating the still-wet, slip coats on the object.
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T is for Transfer printing
Transfer printing is a way of reproducing 2-dimensional designs on ceramics. At its best information technology results in high-quality decoration at a low toll per unit. The pattern is printed onto a sheet of tissue paper or a thin pliable layer of gelatin (animal glue), and then transferred onto the surface of the ware.
The technique was in apply at Birmingham in 1751, though it appears to have been practised at the Doccia factory near Florence in the previous decade. 18th-century transfers were made from both paper and pliable sheets of beast glue (or gelatin), only only paper transfers could be used for printing 'blue and white wares'. During the 19th century gelatin transfers were superseded past tissue paper. This blazon of work is best exemplified by the familiar Willow Pattern.
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U is for underglaze
Underglaze is the reverse of overglaze. It refers to ceramic decoration that lies under the coat, which forms a protective layer. The technique only became possible in Europe when biscuit firing was introduced for fine earthenwares and porcelain (see B is for biscuit). But a few pigments could withstand the heat of the coat firing.
The toughest and virtually reliable underglaze colour proved to be cobalt blue, used by the Chinese potters from the 14th century. In England, blueish painting on porcelain was presently largely replaced by transfer press. This was less skilled work, and required less labour, and then provoked a strike among worried factory decorators in 1770. Happily, the technique was and then practical to cheaper earthenwares with such success that the pottery industry rapidly expanded.
The ornament on 'Tortoiseshell ware' is likewise under-the-coat, produced either past applying metallic oxides with a sponge or brush directly onto the biscuit torso, or perhaps with clay slips stained with oxide colours.
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V is for Veilleuse
This unusual device derives its name from the French for a night vigil. It was used to go on a potable or portion of semi-liquid food warm at dark-fourth dimension, initially only at the bedside of infants or invalids, but from about 1800 for more general use. In the days before electric timers, it was the nearest thing to a combined 'teasmade' and nightlight.
Information technology consists of a hollow pedestal with pierced vents surmounted by either a covered food basin or a small teapot. The heat source is oil burned past means of a floating wick, located in a tiny bowl in the bottom of the pedestal. Veilleuses were made in tin-glazed earthenware, creamware, stoneware, porcelain and os china. They were chiefly made betwixt 1750 and most 1860.
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W is for wasters
Wasters are the discarded remains of ceramic objects that became damaged or deformed during firing. They provide united states of america with commencement hand information nearly production processes. Quite often, the small supports chosen 'spurs' on which a pot was fired are fused to the glazed surface and sometimes nosotros discover a whole stack of dishes, collapsed and fused together. When excavated in their original, workshop context, wasters besides assist us to link sure wares to specific production centres.
Wasters are rarely recycled by the pottery workshops. Instead, they are frequently used every bit hardcore or ballast. Huge quantities of British pottery wasters were employed in the edifice of streets in New Delhi in the 1920s. Wasters should not exist dislocated with slightly deformed products, which frequently still find their way to consumers as 'seconds', although such pieces accept often misled scholars.
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Ten is for Xanto
Francesco Xanto Avelli of Rovigo is the most famous decorator of pottery of the Renaissance, but also the most enigmatic. A literary human, working for most of his career in Urbino, Xanto specialised in 'istoriato' maiolica, a style in which the whole surface of a plate or pot was covered with a painted scene. He ofttimes derived his figures from prints, combining them to grade his own compositions.
Betwixt 1530 to 1542 Xanto signed many of his works. In 1530, he was role of a grouping of maiolica painters in Urbino who demanded higher wages from their patrons. The workshop owners responded with a blacklist of painters, who could only be employed at set up fees and with general approval of all patrons. It is likely that this incident prompted Xanto to sign his works in total. At that place has been much speculation nigh Xanto's work before 1520 and various groups of 'istoriato' maiolica with unlike marks have been attributed to him.
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Y is for Xanthous Ware
Yellow Ware or Yellowish-glaze Ware are terms usually applied to Staffordshire earthenwares of the catamenia 1800-40, often with transfer-printed or silver lustre 'resist' ornamentation over a bright yellow glaze. In contempo years these have become exceedingly popular with American collectors, who reintroduced these terms.
Before, the same names had been used to refer to buff- or cream-coloured ware, and to common earthenwares covered partly or wholly with a yellow glaze, likewise as to American ceramics fabricated from a xanthous-coloured dirt. However, gimmicky manufacturers - notably Josiah Wedgwood, who perfected a type of xanthous glaze in the 1750s - never used such terms.
The first European porcelains with a solid yellow ground colour were highly prized. At Meissen in the 1720s, yellow was used for grand porcelain vases made for Augustus of Saxony. Significantly, it was as well the very first ground colour to be perfected at the Vincennes/Sèvres factory, in 1751. In England, apart from occasional use at Derby and Pinxton, the desirable colour was just applied successfully to highly decorative mass-produced earthenwares.
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Z is for Factory Z
Factory X, Y and Z were classifications given to three groups of late 18th-century English porcelains formerly attributed to the New Hall factory in Staffordshire. Following detailed comparative analysis of their potting and ornament, collectors established that they were made at other, as then unidentified works, even though they were dependent on New Hall's innovations in technique and derived in role from New Hall's patterns and shapes.
Further unattributable groups of this type have been discovered since the original trio were get-go identified in print in 1971. Indeed, i authorization has suggested that collectors and connoisseurs could just every bit well have started at 'A' and worked through the alphabet in attempting classification of these problematic wares. Since then Factory X has been identified as the Tunstall works of A. & Due east. Keeling, but Factory Z is withal a puzzle.
Source: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-z-of-ceramics
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