[Illustration: uncaptioned]
The Industrial Revolution introduced an era of mass production,
technological efficiency, and mass consumption. One of its minor
miracles was the perfection of a hard-boiled white ceramic that was
within the financial reach of most of the population. Though hardly
striking to the modern eye, the white ironstone plates pictured below
(Fig. 2) are the result of years of experimentation by British and other
European potters. In durability, purity of color, and
cost-effectiveness, the everyday ironstones and granitewares of the late
nineteenth century represent a triumph of western ceramic technology
that has been little improved upon since the earlier part of that
century. (See Appendix 1 for a complete listing and illustrations of
ceramic manufacturers’ marks.)
The impetus for this technological marvel goes back to the global
expansionism of Europe’s seafaring nations in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Among the exotica brought back by early traders
was Chinese porcelain, an impermeable white ceramic ware unlike anything
produced in Europe. As trade with the Orient grew, so did importation of
Chinese porcelain. By the eighteenth century, Chinese potters were
regularly turning out blue-and-white “export porcelain” (Fig. 3) made
specifically for the European market. East India Company ships were
transporting it to England as “flooring” to protect perishable cargoes
of tea.
[Illustration: Figure 2. British-made white ironstone or granite
china, 1891-1900. All four plates are marked “MADE IN ENGLAND,” a
convention adopted in 1891 to comply with American import
regulations.]
Much of this porcelain found its way to the American colonies. In the
early colonial period, Chinese porcelain was a relatively rare and
prestigious ware associated with the upper-class custom of afternoon
tea. By the time of the American Revolution, both tea-drinking and
porcelain had spread to the lower classes. When American merchants
opened their own direct trade with China in the 1780s, they brought back
large quantities of porcelain along with the more lucrative teas and
silks. By the 1820s Chinese blue-and-white had become an ordinary
household fixture and, with a concomitant decline in quality of
production, began to lose favor with the American buyer. Very little was
imported after the early 1830s.
[Illustration: Figure 3. Chinese export porcelain. These fragments
are all from plates or serving dishes, probably imported before
1830. All are hand-painted with blue underglaze decoration. The
piece on the upper left retains traces of additional decoration,
including gilding, applied over the glaze.]
[Illustration: Figure 4. French Bourbon Sprig or Cornflower
porcelain, a pattern popular before the French Revolution. Other
pieces of this pattern are on display in the Middleton House dining
room.]
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Oriental
porcelain on the European ceramic industry. Europeans greatly admired
the hardness, whiteness, and thinness of the Chinese imports, and many
of the most important developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century
ceramic manufacture resulted from a conscious effort to imitate these
qualities. Soft paste porcelain, made by adding glass to the clay body,
was an early attempt to reproduce the porcelain paste itself. The
Germans discovered the secret of true hard paste porcelain around 1710
and began producing it at Meissen three years later, followed by the
Austrians at Vienna in 1718 and the French at Sèvres in 1768. Early
European porcelains imitated the Oriental in design as well as paste,
but after about mid-century, chinoiseries gave way to flowers and other
European designs executed in a variety of colors. Through the end of the
century, European porcelain remained an art form available only to the
well-to-do. Figure 4 shows a French porcelain tea plate hand-painted in
the “Bourbon Sprig” or “Cornflower” pattern of scattered flowers popular
during the reign of Louis XVI. Probably produced in Paris in the
eighteenth or early nineteenth century, this plate was part of a large
set of Bourbon Sprig china originally brought from Europe by a member of
the Middleton family after 1820.
[Illustration: Figure 5. English porcelain platter, decorated over
the glaze with the polychrome orientalizing designs favored by early
19th century British ceramic painters. This dish was also probably
part of a large set, fragments of which have been found elsewhere on
the Middleton Place grounds.]
Little hard paste porcelain was produced in England, where bone china, a
somewhat softer porcelain with calcined ox bone added to the paste,
became a favorite material for expensive dinnerwares. Oriental influence
on British ceramics was more immediately felt in the British decorative
style, which through the nineteenth century continued to borrow heavily
from the Chinese and Japanese. Figure 5 illustrates an English porcelain
platter decorated in the colorful pseudo-Oriental motif typical of early
nineteenth century dinner services. These services, often made in stone
china or ironstone, sometimes included as many as two hundred pieces to
accommodate the lavish dinner parties that were the fashionable
entertainment of the day.
[Illustration: Figure 6. Creamware sauce tureen, manufactured by the
Josiah Wedgwood factory. One of the original 1780s Wedgwood designs,
tureens similar to this one are still produced by the Wedgwood
pottery in Barlaston, Staffordshire. Manufacturer’s markings
indicate that this piece was manufactured before 1860.]
A more significant effect of Oriental porcelain on British ceramics was
the revolution it inspired in the production of everyday earthenware.
From the early eighteenth century, British potters had sought to develop
a smooth white-bodied earthenware that could be made from local clays to
compete with the imported blue-and-white. The first real breakthrough in
this endeavor came in the 1760s, when Josiah Wedgwood, the giant of
British ceramic history, began production of a thinly potted pale yellow
pottery known as creamware or queensware (Fig. 6). Dozens of British
factories quickly took up manufacture of creamware, and it became a
staple dinnerware throughout Europe and America. It remained a popular
British and American tableware until the 1820s, after which it
degenerated into a common utilitarian crockery. Known as “C.C. ware,”
creamware finished out the nineteenth century as the cheapest of the
heavy utility wares, used chiefly for such items as mixing bowls and
chamber pots.
On the heels of creamware came pearlware, another Wedgwood invention
that consisted of a slightly whiter-bodied ceramic, which, with the
addition of a clear blue-tinted glaze, came close to approximating the
pearly bluish white of Oriental porcelain. The development of pearlware,
and the even whiter earthenwares that followed, ushered in the great
British period of blue transfer-printing that lasted from the 1780s
through the 1840s. The art of printing glazed ceramics with designs
transferred from engraved copper plates had been known since the 1750s,
but the more durable underglaze process was developed only in the
1770s—and then only in cobalt blue, the one color that consistently
remained unblurred through the high firing temperatures required for
glazing. Blue underglaze printing had been tried to no one’s
satisfaction on the yellow background of creamware, but pearlware, with
its faint bluish tint, was the first earthenware that was both hard
enough and of a suitable color for the new technique. Despite the
development of nearly pure white earthenwares in the early 1800s,
British potters continued throughout the nineteenth century to add the
blue-tinted pearlware glaze to earthenwares of many different
compositions.
Early transfer patterns imitated the Chinese and were engraved into the
copper plates in a series of deep lines, but a technique combining lines
and stippling, which allowed for greater detail and shading, was
introduced about 1810. With this and other developments, Oriental
designs gave way to pastoral and architectural scenes—English, Alpine,
Italianate, and American, among many others—usually surrounded by
borders of English flowers (Fig. 7). In later years, many of these
scenes were printed in various colors made possible by the introduction
of new dyes in the late 1820s, but blue remained the most popular color
through the end of the transfer-printing era in the late 1840s.
[Illustration: Figure 7. Light blue transfer-printed serving bowl,
manufactured by J. & G. Alcock, Staffordshire, 1839-1846. Pastoral
scenes like this TYROL pattern were popular from about 1810 through
the 1840s.]
[Illustration: Figure 8. Molded white ironstone chamber pot,
probably American made, c. 1860-1900.]
The dinnerware that pre-empted transfer-printed earthenware was plain
stone china of the sort pictured in Figure 2. Late nineteenth century
stone china, also known as ironstone, graniteware, and semi-porcelain,
was not a new ceramic but a variant of the stone chinas and ironstones
first produced by Josiah Spode and Charles Mason in the first two
decades of the century. The novelty of the stone chinas sold after 1840
lay in the new inexpensive methods of mass-producing them, and in their
hitherto unthinkable absence of painted decoration. Early nineteenth
century stone chinas had been elaborately decorated with Oriental
wildlife and transfer-printed patterns, but by mid-century it was almost
all stark white, with only embossed or molded decoration. After about
1870, it was often produced with no decoration at all.
Stone china at its best was nearly unbreakable, and thus admirably
suited to life in the still rough-and-ready American states. Like
earlier wares, most of the stone china sold in the United States was
imported from Great Britain. The fledgling American pottery industry did
not begin producing hard-paste whitewares until after 1860, and
throughout the nineteenth century American-made ironstone was considered
inferior to imported china. Much of the early American potter’s energy
went into the production of common utility items, which, like the
probably American-made chamberpot in Figure 8, were often unmarked to
hide their domestic origins.
At the opposite extreme of the decorative scale was English majolica, a
gaudily painted ware introduced by Minton & Co. at the 1851 “Great
Exhibition” in London (Fig. 9). Early Minton majolica was intended as an
imitation of sixteenth century Italian majolica and featured
hand-painted romantic scenes on an opaque white background. The style
quickly evolved, however, into a fancifully molded pottery decorated
with a wide range of colorful semitranslucent glazes. Produced by a
number of factories after about 1860, majolica was used through the end
of the century both for inexpensive domestic items and for sometimes
massive ornamental objects such as jardinieres.
[Illustration: Figure 9. English majolica, c. 1860-1910. This
brightly colored ware was often molded into shapes resembling trees
or other plants. The brown-glazed handle is from a pitcher
apparently colored with blue, yellow, and brown.]
Manufacture of European porcelain had not ceased during the years
British earthenware dominated the American ceramic market, but the
nature of the product had changed considerably. The French porcelain
industry, in particular, had evolved from a restricted craft patronized
by royalty to a number of independently owned factories turning out
standardized dinnerwares for the public taste. These relatively
inexpensive wares appealed to Americans as well as Europeans, and French
porcelains were imported in quantity beginning around 1850. To
Americans, the most prestigious French porcelain came from Limoges,
where a number of factories had clustered to take advantage of extensive
kaolin deposits. Of Limoges porcelain, the most highly regarded was that
produced by Haviland & Co., a firm founded in 1842 by an American china
merchant, David Haviland, to produce porcelain, specifically designed
for the American market (Fig. 10). Cheaper French porcelains, often with
no manufacturer’s mark, were sturdily and heavily made in an apparent
attempt to capture the white ironstone dinnerware market.
[Illustration: Figure 10. Limoges porcelain, c. 1875-1891. The
dinner plate at left bears the hallmark of Haviland & Co., an
American-run French Company that produced porcelain especially for
the American market. Three other undecorated plates, the least
expensive kind of porcelain, were also recovered in the privy
excavation.]
[Illustration: Figure 11. Decal-printed Austrian porcelain, probably
c. 1900-1918. Decal-printing, or decalcomania, was first used on
ceramics around the turn of the century and is a common method of
decorating china today.]
Despite its popularity, French porcelain did not succeed in replacing
white ironstone in the American cupboard. That remained for German and
Austrian porcelain (Fig. 11), an even cheaper ware that began to enter
the country in quantity around 1875, and in prodigious amounts after the
turn of the century. Much admired for their thinness and translucency,
these delicate dinnerwares easily undersold not only ironstone and the
established French and British porcelains, but the then fashionable
pressed glass tableware sets as well. Like most porcelains of the
period, Austrian and German dinner sets were usually decorated with
small sprays of naturalistic flowers. This design was made easier by the
late nineteenth century development of decal-printing, or
“decalcomania,” a process by which multicolored paper patterns are
transferred directly onto the surface of a glazed ceramic.
Decal-printing was first used on European ceramics around 1900, and it
remains a popular ceramic decoration today.
Most of the popular Austrian porcelains were manufactured near Carlsbad
in Bohemia, which after World War I became a part of modern
Czechoslovakia. After World War I Czechoslovakia and other European
countries continued to dominate the American porcelain market. Although
American-made earthenwares and stone chinas had become a competitive
force around the beginning of the century, it was not until World War
II, and the resulting disruption of the European china trade, that
American porcelain manufacturers were able to end the tradition of
imported ceramics that began with seventeenth century Chinese porcelain.