Buttering Up!

 

QUESTION: I first became introduced to little butter dishes, known as butter pats, while browsing tables at a local flea market. Most of the time, dealers place these in glass cases and unless antiquers look carefully, they can easily be missed. 

ANSWER: In the United States and many parts of Europe, wealthy people who had elaborate dinnerware sets for formal dining used butter pat plates primarily in the 1800s and into the early 1900. Each dinner guest was given his or her own butter pat plate on which to put a pat, or lump, of butter.

Butter pats, manufactured in a variety of designs and shapes by the finest porcelain manufacturies, first appeared in the 1850s and reached the height of popularity between 1880 and 1910, though some restaurants and railroads still used them into the 1950s and 1960s. Although also known as butter chips, butters, butter pat plates, or individual butters, they’re commonly referred to as butter pats.

And no proper Victorian table could be set without them. The Victorians loved excess and nowhere was this more evident than in their table settings. During this age of elegance, each kind of food had its own piece of china or silver, and butter wasn’t any different.

Victorians folded a serving a bread, often consumed without butter, hidden in the folds of a napkin at each place setting. If a meal course required bread to be buttered, servants placed individual miniature plates above and slightly to the left of center of the service plates. 

However, butter during the Victorian Age wasn’t commercially processed but made at home. Victorian ladies or their servants labored hard, creating butter in a wooden or stone churn, shaping it with a paddle and squeezing it to remove excess moisture. They then placed the newly churned butter into a mold or shaped it into a mound with wooden paddles. 

The molds typically held a pound of butter. Either the lady of the house or her servants cut the butter into smaller pieces  to serve for special dinners. Sometimes, they shaped the small pats of butter into unusual forms, such as rosettes. Very wealthy families often used decorative individual hand-carved butter stamps featuring the family crest or a special design. 

Made for holding an individual servings of butter, the butter pat reached its zenith during the Victorian era when ornate elegance dictated that every place setting at the dining table consist of several dishes for different foods. As a necessary part of a complete set of fine china, dinnerware manufacturers crafted butter pats with the same attention to detail, and by the turn of the 20th century, they produced them in an array of designs, patterns, and shapes—round, fan-shaped, shell-shaped, as well as the more common square. They often decorated with fish, fowl, and floral motifs, making them into miniature works of art.

Eventually, the extravagance of the Victorian Era gave way to more informal dining. This created a need for durable and practical everyday dishware. Potteries needed to destroy outdated molds and streamline production. This included butter pats, no longer required on the informal dinner table.

Butter itself was often molded or stamped to form patterns, such as flowers, on the butter’s surface. Each individual lump of butter was then placed on a butter pat plate belonging to a specific guest.

Butter pat plates produced in the 1800s and early 1900s were primarily made out of either porcelain or sterling silver, and some made of glass. They were produced as part of dinner service sets or to match existing dinner service sets. Each tiny plate was typically less than three inches square and held either one or two pats of butter at a time.

The colors and designs on the butter pat plates also got more elaborate as time went on. Floral designs were quite common. In some cases, the manufacturers shaped and colored the butter pats to resemble flowers. Square or round ones featured pictures of flowers in their centers or floral patterns around their edges. Other popular butter pat themes included animals and birds.

Butter pat patterns also changed as advertising methods evolved. Some later butter pats had pictures and slogans on them, advertising businesses, events, or advancements of some kind.

Many of the most popular butter pat producers were the “big name” porcelain producers which were historically popular for their dinnerware and decorative pieces. Haviland, Majolica, and Waverly were the most popular. Of Haviland’s up to 60,000 different patterns, most included butter pats as part of a place setting. However, there were many companies which each produced anywhere from a few to dozens of patterns made from many different materials.

Although butter pat manufacturers mass-produced them, some were more unusual. For example, several French and German butter pat manufacturers produced butter pats in the 1800s that artists hand-painted later with elaborate designs and patterns. Some of them even featured hand-painted portraits of people.

With the advent of the modern lifestyles of the 20th century. Butter pats, along with many other forms of formal Victorian dinnerware, lost their appeal. Bread and butter plates, averaging 6 inches in diameter, eventually replaced the butter pat.

Though Wedgwood and Royal Doulton still produce butter pats, they only do so for luxury hotels and First Class airline service. 

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Pottery Marks and What They Tell Us

Mark showing pottery name, factory,
country, date, and pattern.

QUESTION: I go antiquing with a long-time friend. Inevitably, whether we’re browsing the tables at a local fleamarket or browsing in an antique shop or show, he always picks up a piece of pottery or porcelain and turns it over to see the mark. What do these marks say about the pieces besides who possibly made them? And are there any other marks from the making of the piece and what do they tell him?

ANSWER: An experienced collector of pottery can tell a lot about a piece’s origin by reading the manufacturers' marks on the bottom of each piece. These marks tell the pottery's name, its location, its company symbol, and often the pattern name or the name given to the body shape of the piece. 

Stamped mark

But there may also be other, less obvious, marks that indicate the method of production or factory flaws that show the level of quality control used by the firm. Collectors familiar with these signs can quickly distinguish between factory flaws and more serious indicators of damage and wear inflicted upon that same piece once it has left the  factory. Knowing the difference allows the experienced collector to purchase pottery with confidence.

While most manufacturer’s marks, which may he printed, incised, impressed, stamped, or applied as paper labels, usually contain the pottery’s name, initials, symbol and location---or some combination of these—some are rather sparse and may only contain a letter within a geometric shape or a crest. 

In the case of the larger firms, a pottery mark also has publicity value and shows the buyer that  a long-established company with a reputation to uphold has made a piece. Such clear name- marks include Wedgwood, Minton, Royal Crown Derby, Royal Doulton, and Royal Worcester in Britain and Bennington, McCoy, and Hull in the U.S.

Though these marks are one of the best and easiest ways to identify ceramics, the shear number of them makes it impossible to every mark. Additionally, many small firms either saw no reason to use marks or sometimes used marks that haven’t been identified because of the short life span and limited production of the company.

Metal stamped mark into clay

To the collector a pottery mark can also identify the manufacturer and help establish the approximate date of manufacture and in several cases the exact year of production, particularly in the case of 19th and 20th century wares from the leading firms which employed private dating systems. With the increasing use of ceramic marks in the 19th century, a large proportion of English and American pottery and porcelain can be accurately identified and often dated.

Pottery’s added marks to their wares in several ways. They could incise them into the soft clay before the piece air dried, in which the mark will show a slight ploughed-up effect. Potters often do this to handmade pieces. Some manufacturers of quantity pieces, such as Wedgwood, impressed a mark into the soft clay using a metal or clay stamp or seal. 

Many pottery manufacturers used painted marks—usually containing their name or initial—added over the glaze at the time of decoration. Some used stencils.

Engraved transfer printed mark

Lastly, most 19th-century pottery makers used printed marks transferred from engraved copper plates at the time of decoration, often in blue under the glaze when the main design is also underglaze blue.

Pottery marks weren’t always universally used. In 1890, President William McKinley introduced the McKinley Tariff Act that imposed tariffs on many imports, including pottery, so that American manufacturers could more easily sell their products. The Act required that all such imports show the name of country of manufacture, such as “England,” “Germany,” “Nippon,” or “France.” In 1921, an amendment to the Act required that the phrase “Made in” precede the country of origin, such as “Made in England” or “Made in Japan.” However, some foreign companies began using the phrase as early as 1898. This is a great way for collectors to date foreign-made pieces.

Underglaze marks

Beginning pottery collectors often miss marks or flaws from manufacturing and instead focus only on the maker’s mark. These marks give clues to the quality of the ceramic bodies each maker used. Potteries used different firing techniques for different grades of ceramics and the distinctive marks each technique left behind, once known, help to establish the quality of a piece.

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The Beauty of Doulton Burslem Ware

QUESTION: I recently came across several pieces of what a dealer called Doulton Burslem Ware at an antique show. I have never heard of this type of pottery, even though I have several pieces made by Royal Doulton in my collection. Were these pieces specially made? Did Doulton make them in a separate factory. Where did the name Burslem come from?

ANSWER: Over its history, Royal Doulton made a variety of types of ceramics, including pottery and porcelain. Its Burslem line featured its finest porcelains.

John Doulton began his working life as a potter’s apprentice at Dwight’s Pottery in Fulham, England. In 1815, he went into business for himself in Lambeth, partnering with a journeyman names John Watts and a widow named Martha Jones. After Martha Jones left the partnership in 1820, John Doulton changed the company’s  name to Doulton & Watts. The business specialized in making stoneware articles, including decorative bottles and salt glaze sewer pipes. The firm took the name Doulton & Company in 1853 after the retirement of John Watts.

His son, Henry, joined his father in 1835 at age 15. He quickly mastered the technique of throwing large vessels. Legend has it that he once made 15 3-gallon filter cases before breakfast. To celebrate his coming of age in 1841, Henry made and fired a 300-gallon chemical jar. His father was so proud of him he displayed it with a sign reading, "The largest stoneware vessel in the world."

Not only did Henry have skill in making pottery, but he was a big thinker and attuned to the artistic tastes of the public. By 1871, Henry Doulton launched a studio at the Lambeth pottery, offering work to designers and artists from the nearby Lambeth School of Art.  In 1877 Henry bought out Pinder, Bourne and Company, a pottery located in Burslem, Staffordshire, England. This placed him in the region known as The Potteries. Five years later he changed the name to Doulton and Company.

Henry fostered an artistic environment that encouraged individual expression, and  soon his workers made some of the most beautiful porcelains of the time. Not only did he hire women, but handicapped artists as well.

Henry was given the Albert Medal by the Royal Society of Arts in 1885 and was knighted in 1887 because of his contributions to the artistic life of England. In the late 1800s anyone who wanted to be in style owned Doulton items.

Sir Henry held off displaying the new Burslem porcelains at exhibitions until he was confident that he could show his competitors the best of his artists were cap-able of producing. At the Chicago Exhibition in 1893 he felt the public was ready for the new range. Large vases, including one which was 6 feet high, were modeled by Charles Noke' and painted by Charles Labarre, who had come to Doulton's from Sevres in France. Other items exhibited were floral painted dessert services and fish and game sets. The Doulton Works took seven of the highest awards, the most given to any ceramic firm.

Doulton's factory at Burslem produced a tremendous amount of tableware and beautifully decorated items, such as vases, ewers and plaques, all of high quality porcelain. It took the work of many skilled craftsman and women to accomplish this.

Notable artists such as Percy Curock, Daniel Dewsbury, Edward Raby, George White and, of course, Charles Noke experimented with glazes, including Changware, Chinese Jade, Sung, and Flambe'.

The Art Nouveau movement influenced many of Doulton’s artists in the late 19th century. In 1889, when Doulton recruited Charles Noke' from the Worcester factory as its chief modeler, many of his earliest pieces featured Oriental-style dragons in high relief. Vases and ewers had gilded dragon handles or molded dragons crawling up the sides. Dragons became an important part of Noke's work, especially when he began experimenting with the Chinese rouge flambe glazes in the early 1900s.

By this time Doulton had become known for its stoneware and ceramics, under the artistic direction of John Slater, who worked with figurines, vases, character jugs, and decorative pieces designed by the prolific Leslie Harradine. Doulton products came to the attention of the Royal family. In 1901 King Edward VII sold the Burslem factory the Royal Warrant, allowing the business to adopt new markings and a new name, Royal Doulton. The company added products during the first half of the 20th century while manufacturing fashionable and high-quality bone china.

Early Doulton artists frequently used nature as their theme, befitting the Art Nouveau style. Flowers were a very popular subject, usually done in muted colors outlined in gold. They also used animals, especially farm animals such as cows and goats, to decorate vases and other items, many with hand-painted landscapes.

In the first few years of the Burslem factory, some unique, very fragile pieces were made with colorful applied seashells or flowers, vines and leaves in an effort to duplicate some of the Amphora pieces made in Austria during that time. Some of these pieces are still in existence today and are eagerly sought by collectors.



During the late 19th century, when the Burslem craftsmen were producing their wares, many competing potters from the Worcester, Royal Bonn and Rudolstadt factories were also producing similar pieces. All of them employed the Spanish Ware technique—the  painting of very fine raised 22-karat gold outline traceries of flowers and leaves, combined with on-glaze enamel painting, often on an ivory or vellum ground. Many pieces had elaborate gilded scroll handles and three or four feet. Some rare pieces even had sections of reticulation.

Many of the cups and saucers from tea, coffee and chocolate services were very delicate in nature and also painted in muted colors using flowers as a theme. Much use of gold was used to decorate the cups and saucers, not only to outline the flowers, but the handle and trim were almost always done in gold. Doulton did a series called Blue Iris. The majority of the pieces in this line used blue flowers on a cream background, embellished by much gold tracery.

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Raise a Jug

QUESTION: I recently found a large character jug at a local flea market. The dealer said it was old, most likely from the late 19th century. How can I tell if it is indeed old or maybe just a reproduction?

ANSWER: There’s lots of confusion about character, or as they’re more commonly known, Toby jugs, inspired by the original Toby Jug, with its brown salt glaze, developed and popularized by Staffordshire potters in the 1760s. They got the idea from similar Delft ware jugs produced in the Netherlands.

The first Toby jugs, made in the form of a jovial, stout, man wearing a long coat and tri-corn hat of the late-18th-century, puffing on a pipe, and holding a jug of ale, became common pouring vessels at local taverns. The pitcher had a rear handle and a removable lid, and the tricorn hat formed a pouring spout. Most antique historians attribute the first one to attributed to either John Astbury or Thomas Wheildon.

There are two theories as to origin of the jugs’ name. Some believe the jovial, intoxicated character of Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare's play, Twelfth Night, inspired it while others believe  a notorious 18th century Yorkshire drinker, Henry Elwes, also known as "Toby Fillpot" was the inspiration. Either way, the name stuck.

Well-known potters, such as Ralph Wood I and II, Enoch Wood, Thomas Hollins and William Pratt, followed Astbury and Wheildon lead and began making Toby jugs in Staffordshire and Leeds, England.

Most collectors equate Doulton Pottery with Toby jugs since John Doulton established his riverside pottery at Lambeth, south of London, in 1815. His company manufactured miles of sewer pipe and became the leader in the sanitation revolution of the time. Today, Doulton, now known as Royal Doulton, is famous for its plates, vases, and jugs, decorated with popular imagery from English history and literature.

While Royal Doulton made Toby jugs for the remainder of the 19th century, it wasn’t until 1901 that it introduced figures, series ware, and rack or case plates. Over time, these became highly collectible. In 1934, Charles Noke of Royal Doulton introduced the first modern character jug, John Barleycorn, a symbol of the brewers, followed by Old-Charley, Night Watchman, Sairey Gamp, the midwife and sick-nurse from Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, Parson Brown, the sporting cleric, and Dick Turpin, the highwayman. The character jug series features lifelike caricatures of the heads of famous historical personalities and legendary characters from folklore, literature, and popular culture. The difference between a Toby jug and a character jug is that the former features a full figure while the latter just the head and shoulders of the person.

On jugs made before 1960, a dark glaze bleeds over the rim and into the white glazed interior. But the best way to tell the age of a character jug is by its mark. Many of the older jugs have a capital "A" to the left of the "Lion and Crown — Royal Doulton - Made in England" stamp printed on jugs made from the 1930s to the 1950s. After the 1950s, Royal Doulton printed the mark in darker green and without the A.

Doulton jugs made in the 1930s show the name of the character in quotation marks. On those made in the 1950s, the letter “D’ precedes the name of the character without quotes, with the  copyright date lying underneath.

Those jugs marked with an “A” are actually less valuable because Royal Doulton, over time, flooded the market with them. However, character jugs introduced in the 1950s and discontinued in the 1960s, such as Johnny Appleseed, Simple Simon, Dick Whittington, Admiral Nelson, the Hatless Drake and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh, are more valuable than those marked with an “A.” Also, the company made its character jugs in five sizes, from small to large.

The smaller ones, marked Doulton Made in England in a circle with the name of the character in the center, cost $2 new and now sell for $100 to $300 each.  A complete set can sell for $1,500 to $2,000.  The larger ones sell for $100 to $500 each. And as with any collectible, there are exceptions.

By the late 20th century, over 200 different makers, including Royal Doulton, Shorter and Son, Lancaster-Sandland, Royal Worcester, and Wedgwood & Co. were producing Toby character jugs. However, as the 21st century dawned, their popularity waned and many stopped making them. Today, only three companies still produce Toby character jugs.

On the Wings of Memories

QUESTION: My father traveled a lot by plane for his business. He got in the habit of keeping a souvenir from each flight. I now have his collection of decks of playing cards, postcards, timetables, flight wings, dishes, silverware, and flight bags. Do people collect these items?

ANSWER: When commercial airline flights became more available to the general public in the late 1940s and 1950s, it was still a big deal to fly. Passengers dressed in their Sunday best for even the shortest flights. Because it was a treat, airlines served meals on china plates, often with silver flatware in First Class, handed out playing cards to keep their passengers busy in the days before movies aloft, and gave little mementos and games to children.

This practice continued well into the 1980s when airlines began phasing out some items, started using stainless steel instead of silver for flatware and plastic instead of china for plates. But for at least four decades, and even before that, they promoted themselves by placing their logos on ashtrays, dishes, flatware, napkins, baggage tags, flight bags, blankets, eye shades, games, toys, menus, pins, and posters—to name just a few items.

There are lots of collectors of airline memorabilia. Propelled by personal memories of a first flight or perhaps a first transAtlantic flight, passengers began taking home all sorts of airline items. Add to that, the up-in-the-air status of particular airlines from time to time and the demise of so many of the original carriers has caused much speculation in the airline collectibles market.

Searching for the term "airlines" on eBay results in over 71,000 ongoing auctions. This general
also includes offerings such as current flight vouchers, tickets, and luggage.

Some of the hottest items sought by collectors are dishes and silverware featuring an airline’s name or logo. It became fashionable for airlines to have these types of items used in First Class produced  by top-name designers and manufacturers such as Lenox and Royal Doulton. That was in the day when chic stewardesses placed linen tablecloths over First Class seat-back trays and served wine in fine crystal goblets. Nothing was too good for their passengers, especially wealthy ones who were used to the best.

Also, the older the memento, the more valuable. Likewise, the more owned, or conversely, the more limited the airline's history, the more significant the interest. If an airline was short-lived, it’s items are particularly popular.

Another item that isn’t around much anymore are flight bags. In the early days of jet travel in the 1960s, every participant of a group tour that flew to their destination received a flight bag with the airline or tour operator’s logo on it. One from Pan Am from the 1960s is now up for auction on eBay for a starting bid of $69. One used by a Pan Am flight attendant is going for $80.

For many people, a flight on the Concorde was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A rare lady’s compact with the Concorde logo is going for nearly $100 on eBay. And a pair of British Airways Concorde salt and pepper shakers, made by Royal Doulton, has a starting bid of $35.

First Class menus are also popular airline collectibles. A United Airlines menu from 1964-65, featuring the tag line “Official airline of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair,” is going for $20 on ebay. And four B.O.A.C. menus from the 1960s are going for $100.

The great thing about collecting most of these items is that they’re relatively inexpensive. While rarer airline items can sell for double and triple figures, most sell for prices in the single or low double-digit range.

For more information, read Up, Up and Away at TheAntiquesAlmanac.com