History on the Dining Table

QUESTION: Ever since I began collecting antiques, I’ve always been fascinated by the beautiful Staffordshire transferware designs on dinnerware. Recently, I saw several stunning pieces at an antique show. These featured American battle scenes and images of historical sites. I thought transferware had only bucolic scenes of the English countryside. Why did English potters produce this type of ware and when was it popular?

ANSWER: That’s a very good question. In fact, most Americans today probably don’t know that English potters were some of our country’s staunch supporters, even risking near treason to do so.

It was bad enough that American soldiers defeated the British in the Revolutionary War, but then on December 14, 1815, the British military conceded defeat to the Americans for a second time. Josiah Wedgwood, a prominent 18th-century English potter, had proclaimed the American Revolutionary War a serious mistake for Britain. He and his fellow potters of the Staffordshire district felt no better about the War of 1812. After all, with the destruction,   blockades, and hatred it generated, warfare was bad for business since the Americans had always been good customers.



To make amends, the Staffordshire potters promptly began decorating their dinner services, tea sets, and assorted crockery with scenes of American military victories guaranteed to make   Americans proud while leaving British generals and admirals glowering in disgust. To add to the victories, the potters exported dinnerware with images of America's war heroes, elder statesmen and favorite politicians. With these, the potters of Staffordshire won back the hearts of their American customers. Historical Staffordshire became the success the potters had hoped for—an economic victory where the British military had failed.

Historical Staffordshire wares were popular, durable, mass-produced in quantity and reasonably priced. They reached a wide audience and offer today’s collectors with fascinating glimpses of America’s past.

Although the Staffordshire potteries produced mugs, pitchers, foot baths, and chamber pots, dinnerware and tea services dominated production of historical Staffordshire ceramics. The potteries first produced it in pearlware and later in a number of durable white wares. Both pearl and white wares were almost as white as porcelains but were rugged enough to survive rough oceanic voyages. Artists decorated the earliest of these with printed transfers in deep cobalt blue that had become popular in the United States. A wider range of colors followed in the 1830s. Running short of military victories and notable personages, the potteries turned to more peaceful subjects, such as individual buildings, towns, idyllic landscapes, and the newest advances in Victorian transportation.

Staffordshire potteries manufactured historical dinnerware from about 1820 to 1860, reaching the height of its popularity between 1820 and 1845.

Printing scandalous portraitures to promote sales was nothing new to the Staffordshire potters. Putting pots before principle was an old habit. Britain’s politicians had long been lampooned and her military heroes hailed on transfer printed pots and mugs to promote sales at home.

During the War of 1812, industrious British engravers supported the cause of American freedom with near-treasonable anti-government images of cringing British lions emblazoned with insulting, anti-English slogans. These could be slipped out through the neutral Netherlands and taken to shore by any number of unrecorded vessels navigating up lesser traveled American waterways.

The designs on historical Staffordshire wares were examples of an early mass- production technique of the growing Industrial Revolution, transfer printing. England's potters developed the technique during the 18th century and perfected it in the 19th century. Industrialization provided British potters with the most rapidly growing stock of earthenware bodies in history. Transfer printing allowed them to quickIy produce large numbers of identically decorated wares from this stock for the first time in potting history. Together the new, white earthenware bodies and the printed patterns would provide a popular, quality ware at a fairly low price, a ware many families of modest means could easily afford.



The quality of the transfer printed pattern, however, was crucial. The artwork determined whether the ware sold well or not. Artists created transfer printed patterns, some of whom had great skill while others didn’t. The largest pottery manufacturers hired their own artist engravers. Smaller companies purchased their patterns from engraving firms. The transfer printing process perfected by Sadler and Green of Liverpool in 1756 allowed a potter to duplicate a pattern by transferring it from an engraved and pigmented copper plate to a ceramic vessel using a specially treated paper.

Artists copied artwork directly from books of the day and from competing engravers' portfolios. They created illustrations for dining services featuring different central prints on each piece, all following a common theme—a "City Series" or a series of "Picturesque Views" for example. Since the central print varied from plate to plate, the artists created a standard border design  to identify the pieces of a single service. Most Staffordshire potters identified specific border designs as their own unique trademarks. In most cases that view was respected. However, smaller companies did copy these designs from time to time.

Women did the meticulous work of correctly placing the inky paper carrying the pattern onto the bisque pottery and for joining the seams of the borders and designs. Most took great care in doing this since they were aware of the Victorian ideal of the "perfect finish." Many of the historical Staffordshire prints how these ladies tried to achieve that ideal. Their printed patterns appear seamless although they placed most of them using several pieces.

However, hastily engraved, copper plates provided transfers that were often larger than the  pottery on which they were to be placed. These oversized patterns, once transferred to their papers, had to be cut and trimmed to fit the smaller vessels. The trimming often led to virtually illegible inscriptions as the women cropped the letters away. While the images frequently remained whole, the words suffered as few of the women trimming the prints could read. They trimmed that which had little meaning to them. Not that it mattered too much because many of their customers couldn’t read either.

And while housewives used historical Stafforshire ware for serving guests and at holidays, eventually the transfer images evolved into peaceful bucolic scenes and souvenir plates.

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