Shaping the Modern American Lifestyle

 

QUESTION: For the last several years I’ve begun to purchase various pieces of Mid-Century Modern furniture and accessories. While doing so, the name Russel Wright has come up frequently. I understand he was one of the more influential industrial designers of the 20th century. I’d like to learn more about him and his designs, so that I can be on the lookout for them as I browse thrift shops and used furniture stores. What can you tell me about Wright and his designs?

ANSWER: Russel Wright was indeed a master of modern design. He created dinnerware, glasses, spun aluminum, wooden tableware, stainless steel flatware, textiles, and furniture, giving a sense of style to the modern American home. Wright was one of the premier industrial designers of the modern era.

He first began to work in silver and chrome, creating small decorative circus animals for gift shops. His later work in chrome came after he signed a contract to design for Chase Brass & Copper, which he did from 1935 to 1946. Wright's designs for Chase are hot marked with his name.

Wright’s early gift items were expensive, and being in the midst of the Great Depression, he found it necessary to develop items that were more affordable. So he instead turned to spun aluminum, actually manufacturing items in the basement of he and his wife’s home.  He created around a 100 items, including stove-to-table items, a concept which doesn’t work well in aluminum but which was later expressed in other materials. Wright combined aluminum with wood, rattan, or cork, enabling the resulting pieces to be combined in a variety of ways.

From aluminum Wright moved on in 1935 to create the Oceanic line of woodenware for Elise Wood Working Company. For these designs, he used naturalistic the forms of leaves, snail spirals, starfish, and water ripples. Even though they were all machine made, these products had a handmade look and feel.

Wright's first furniture designs, for Heywood-Wakefield in 1934, made use of curved veneers and looked more Art Deco than his later furniture. Unfortunately, these pieces didn’t sell well and weren’t durable enough to use constantly. But they showed Wright's early interest in open stock pieces that could be used in a variety of ways.

The breakthrough in furniture design for Wright came with his introduction of American Modern, a line manufactured in American rock maple by Conant Ball, which sold the pieces in both dark and "blonde" finishes. Wright’s wife, Mary, coined the name "American Modern," which was later used for other products for the home. Macy's was so enthusiastic about the furniture line that they constructed a nine-room house in their New York store to display the furniture in room settings.

Wright also worked with the Old Hickory Furniture Company in Martinsville, Indiana on unique rustic furniture featuring his modern stylings. The Old Hickory line first appeared in 1942 and some of the designs stayed popular through the 1950s.

In 1939, Wright introduced a colorful line of American Modern china, the most widely sold American ceramic dinnerware in the country’s history, made by Steubenville Pottery, of Steubenville, Ohio. But American Modem china was low-tired, thus subject to chipping and crazing. After World War II, Wright introduced Iroquois Casual China, made with a high-fired glaze, suitable for dishwasher use, that came with a three-year guarantee. 

He followed his successful china line with glasses, flatware and textiles. This was the beginning of Wright’s American lifestyle, as he offered consumers a way to create a comfortable home with a unified look as they put it together, piece by piece. American Modern china, in production from 1939 until 1959, was the country’s all-time biggest selling line of dishes.

In addition to ceramic dinnerware, Wright also designed several popular lines of Melmac melamine resin plastic dinnerware for the home and did early research on plastic Melmac dinnerware for restaurant use. Beginning in 1953, Northern Plastic Company of Boston began production of his first Melmac line of plastic dinnerware for the home, called "Residential."  

As with his ceramic dinnerware, Wright began designing his Melmac only in solid colors, but by the end of the 1950s created several patterns ornamented with decoration, usually depicting plant forms.

Wright's approach to design came from the belief that the dining table was the center of the home. Working outward from there, he designed tableware to larger furniture, architecture to landscaping, all fostering an easy, informal lifestyle. It was through his popular and widely distributed housewares and furnishings that he influenced the way many Americans lived and organized their homes in the mid-20th century.

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Artful China

 

QUESTION: A friend of mine recently gave me a colorful vase that has two handles and a design of some sort of fruit on the front. The mark on the bottom says “Laughlin Art China” along with the image of an eagle. Can you tell me what company made this and when? 

ANSWER: Your vase is one of hundreds of pieces produced by the Laughlin China Company in the first decade of the 20th century. While the company made some of the pieces, such as soup tureens and platters, it made most of its pieces for display only.

At the turn of the 20th century, American potteries, formerly limited to the production of dinnerware and washstand toilet sets, took a cue from the vogue for American art pottery and began developing decorative "specialty ware" or art china.

Characterized by unusual decals surrounded by a background of solid color applied with an air brush or atomizer, these wares mimicked the standard glaze and hand-painted ware of such art potteries as Rookwood, Roseville and Weller. At first, manufacturers used a brown background but soon changed that to bright red, magenta, green, blue-green, pink and sometimes combinations of several colors. The first American pottery to popularize the style seems to have been the Warwick Pottery of Wheeling, West Virginia. 

Many potteries in the Ohio Valley quickly copied the art china concept. None, however, elaborated up on the idea with more verve and success than Homer Laughlin China of East Liverpool, Ohio, which began production if its art china in 1900. 

But neither Homer nor Shakespeare Laughlin, the founders of Homer Laughlin China Co., had anything to do with the development of Laughlin Art China. The brothers did develop a whiteware pottery on a subscription basis in East Liverpool in 1873, but Shakespeare dropped out in 1877. While Homer Laughlin expanded the company, beginning the production of semi-vitreous porcelain in the 1890s and incorporating the company in 1896, he retired two years later and moved to California.

During these early years, there was one notable and highly successful effort by Laughlin China to produce artistic china-ware. Around 1886, the company succeeded. Marked with the words "Laughlin China" in a horseshoe, workers frequently decorated it  using the French pate-sur-pate technique, with cameo-like white designs on a blue ground. But such ware is rare, as Laughlin only made it for three years.

Under new management, notably that of William E. Wells, the Laughlin pottery continued to expand, completing a second plant in East Liverpool's East End in 1900, soon followed by a third plant. In 1903,. it traded plants with the National China Co. and then enjoyed a combined capacity of 35 kilns.

Shapes that are known to have been used for Laughlin specialties include American Sweetheart, King Charles, Genesee, Hudson and The Angelus. A number of these shapes, notably Kwaker, continued in production as late as the 1940s, 

Beginning in 1903, Laughlin China marked its art china specialties with a gold stamp featuring an eagle trying its wings, over a script "Laughlin." The firm sold the first pieces that same year, but they didn’t appear in company sales literature until 1905. Actual production seems to have been limited to five or six years.

Laughlin produced more than 130 different shapes and sizes of its art china with a currant decal, the most common form of decoration. 

But the White Pets design, the best known, featured a series of dogs, cats and birds, the most common being a pair of pointers, usually shown amid a clump of cattails. The use of a decal showing a pair of white cockatoos may have been a response to Warwick China's striking use of white birds on a white ground.

Another popular Laughlin Art China pattern was Dreamland, bearing a variety of Kate Greenaway-like children's scenes, usually involving a goat, with a blended yellow, green and brown back-ground. Like White Pets, this line often lacked the Laughlin Art China eagle backstamp and simply bore the line name. Unlike White Pets, Dreamland was decorated not with a simple decal but by "pouncing," a process in which the design was enhanced by the addition of small particles of carbon pigment, particularly effective in the cartoon-like Dreamland and Holland decorations. Other cartoon-like decorative lines utilized a variety of frog decals, most likely inspired by Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

Other companies occasionally decorated Homer Laughlin blanks using different decals and decorating techniques. Perhaps most notable was the little-known McKean Pottery of Minerva, Ohio, which specialized in a faux wood grain decorative background, a line which they called Angora. 

With Laughlin art china, condition is very important, particularly in collecting art china decorated with the air-brushed background, since this type of decoration wears easily. Because Laughlin intended some of its art china to be used, the delicate nature of the decoration was a problem and may be part of the reason for its decline in popularity. However, some pieces are so rare that even substantial amounts of wear don’t rule out significant prices.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Whiskey by the Jug

 

QUESTION: Recently, while browsing the tables of a local flea market, I discovered a cute little porcelain jug with the name “Old Maryland 1881...St. Louis, Mo.” Stamped on the bottom was the mark “K.T.K./CHINA.” Can you tell me what company made this and what would the jug have contained?

ANSWER: Little ceramic jugs like this usually held whiskey. They were a gimmick used by distillers to promote their liquors. The firm of Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Company of East Liverpool, Ohio, made many of them and their “K.T.K./CHINA” mark the bottom of many of them.

From the early 17th century, people drank liquor regularly. And there were always people who viewed it as evil and sought to prevent its use, usually by taxation. In 1753, the legislature of the Colony of New York established an excise tax. By the 1850s, at least 13 states had enacted some type of prohibition laws against the use of liquor, yet by the Civil War, most of these laws had either been repealed or declared unconstitutional.

The Civil War Excise Law of 1862, which established a license for "retail dealers in liquors," originally exempted pharmacists. Two years later, Congress amended the law to apply a $1.50 per gallon tax on all distilled spirits that also applied to pharmacists. But in 1870, Congress again amended the law permitting pharmacists to dispense alcohol for "medicinal purposes.”

There are some Knowles, Taylor & Knowles china whiskey jugs that have the words "expressly for medicinal use" imprinted on them. An ad in the Daily Crisis of East Liverpool, Ohio, on September 10, 1892, stated, “Cholera, the best and finest prevention of this dread disease is to use a few drops of Diamond Club Pure Rye in every drink of water." The distiller declared this whiskey to be “officially recognized by the medical profession in every part of the United States as the purest on the market and is used extensively of medicinal purposes, in kidney diseases and ailments of a like character. It is acknowledged to be unequaled as a bracer and appetizer and as a rejuvenator of a debilitated system." Not only did liquor distributors continue selling their products, they also found a way to avoid paying the excise tax. 

The firm of Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Company began operations in 1870, when Isaac Knowles, Colonel John N. Taylor (Isaac’s son-in-law), and Isaac's son Homer formed a partnership.. By the early 1890s, the firm had mastered the making of bone china called Lotus Ware. 

The china whiskey jugs produced by the firm were bulbous and tapered to a slender neck, decorated with gold trimming. The top of the applied handle, also decorated with gold, had the look of a serpents head, a novel way for the jug to stand out from other whiskey jugs.

The mass-produced jugs came in several colors with transfer designs. Green seemed to be the most widely used color, but sometimes the same style jug appeared in red, blue, and brown.

Jugs also came in different sizes, the most common being the quart size, but there were also pints and half pints. Most jugs had one handle but some had two.

The sharp and artistic transfer designs on the jugs showed off the talent of the artists and the innovative ideas of the firm. The fancy lettering on the jugs may have inspired collectors to keep the jugs as decorative pieces, instead of discarding them as just another container.

George W. Meredith of East Liverpool, Ohio, a former employee of Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Company, fast became a leader in the distribution of his product called "Diamond Club Pure Rye Whiskey." At his peak, he distributed his whiskey from coast to coast. Meredith, who was always looking for new ways to sell his whiskey, and his association with the firm of Knowles,Taylor & Knowles Company, probably had a lot to do with the production of the unique china whiskey jug.

An aggressive advertiser of his "Diamond Club Pure Rye Whiskey ," Meredith was the only distributor known to use the pint and half-pint containers. He also had a 154-inch size, known at the time as a "watch fob." Though it didn’t contain any whiskey, it was a consistent reminder to its possessor of the G.M. Meredith Company.

During this same period, American liquor distributors were also looking for ways to sell  their products, and on special occasions, to provide a gift to their best customers. The fancy liquor containers, inexpensive to purchase, were the perfect solution. The Irish, British and Scottish distributors of the same era had been using fancy jugs to promote their whiskey and had been very successful in thwarting thefts.

Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Co. also produced hand-painted china whiskey jugs. Companies or individuals not in the liquor business purchased these jugs for special occasions. The hand-painted jugs were interesting in themselves, as they showed the Victorian influence. Some had Victorian ladies painted on them surrounded by silver overlay. The scenes often depict flowers, from single roses to bunches of flowers with leaves and stems.

Though Knowles, Taylor & Knowles made jugs with transfer designs, their hand-painted jugs aren’t as easily recognized. The firm didn’t mark its jugs, whether hand-painted or not, any differently. During the Victorian era and into the 20th century, it was popular to buy undecorated items and paint them for business or gifts. Often a professional artists decorated the piece, so the decoration itself cannot offer a clue as to whether or not a piece had been decorated at the factory. Also, most of the factory pieces weren’t signed because the artist worked by the piece and too much time would have been wasted by signing and dating items. However, amateur artists did like to sign their pieces. Most hand-painted items found today that are signed and dated probably fall into that category.

Knowles, Taylor & Knowles produced their china whiskey jugs from 1891 to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, when bankruptcy forced the company to close.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

A Juicy Solution

QUESTION: I was visiting my grandmother the other day and noticed that when she needed some lemon juice for a dish she was preparing, she pulled out a funny looking contraption, placed half a lemon on it, and pushed down on the lemon while turning it slowly. The juice from the lemon flowed into a grove at the bottom. She then poured the juice into her pan and continued cooking. What is this device called and did everyone use them back in the day?

ANSWER: Younger Americans think lemon juice comes from those cute plastic lemons---or from fancy and expensive electric stainless steel appliances that sit on their kitchen counter. Many have never had to squeeze juice by hand, but it wasn't so very long ago when that's exactly what everyone had to do in order to have the lemon juice for a dish or a refreshing glass of OJ. But instead of an electric appliance, people used a reamer.

The French made the earliest reamer, registered in 1767, of nickel silver and porcelain. First produced in Europe, reamers later appeared in the U.S. European reamers were  some of the finest ever created, including those produced by the finest china companies, such as Limoges, Royal Bayreuth, R.S. Prussia, and Meissen.

Though Charles L. Tiffany offered a reamer at his Tiffany and Company store in New York in the early 1880s, the first juice extractor patented in the U.S. was on May 30,1865. This was actually a wooden juice press.

The hand-held lemon squeezer created by George Cornford patented the first hand-held, clear glass lemon squeezer on August 19,1884, and it resembled a darning egg. 

Before the turn of the 20th century, more inventors patented designs for their own juice squeezers. R.E. Bristow of Rockford, IIlinios, registered "The Ideal" on January 31, 1888. John Easley of Manhattan registered a hand-cranked reamer on July 10, 1888, which was the first of his many patents until 1900. In fact, reamer designers of the early to mid 1880s created intricate mechanical designs culminating in the creation of a model that first cut the fruit in half and then extracted the juice.

But these were too sophisticated for the average user. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, designs reverted back to single-piece glass reamers. The registered patent designs of Thomas Curley, whose design was called, what else, the "Curley." Easley came out with a three-piece model, and the Holmes Company gave the world the “Holmes,” which was made of glass. Still the design that finally remained for years to come was Arthur Bennet’s “Lemon Squeezer,” patented on February 16, 1909.

This one brings to mind the classic juice reamer. Made of one piece of glass, the "Lemon Squeezer" had a pointed, grooved center for twisting the fruit on to remove its juice. The juice ran into the shallow dish below the reamer part. The "Lemon Squeezer" also had a handle to 'hold for pouring and a spout.

The first reamers or juicers were for extracting lemon juice for cooking or for flavoring, not necessarily for juicing oranges for making orange juice. Though oranges are available year round now, in 1900 they were exotic and expensive.

But that changed in 1907 when Sunkist, established as the trademark for the California Fruit Grower's oranges, appeared on the market. By 1916, Sunkist began offering glass reamers as a way to promote their oranges. But orange juicers and lemon juicers weren’t the same. Lemon juicers didn’t need a "bowl" or area on the juicer to hold a large amount of juice, but the orange reamers did, which brought about a major change in the style of reamers.

Sunkist was the leader in design changes. Besides offering reamers with "juice receptacles," many of the Sunkist reamers also had embossed lettering, spelling out "Sunkist Oranges and Lemons" or "Sunkist-California Fruit Grower's Exchange.” Sunkist vigorously promoted them through department and variety stores, grocery outlets and by mail-order. Sunkist continued to offer reamers, many made by the McKee Glass Company, until 1961.

By the 1920s and 1930s, reamers became more colorful with the introduction of Depression Glass. In 1922, the Fly Glass Company introduced Pearl Glass, and by 1925 reamers could be purchased in a variety of colors, from Vaseline glass to amber, pink, and emerald green glass. The Great Depression produced more glass reamers  than ever before or after.

There were other produced in the 1930s, including the 'Servitor," the "Handy Andy," and the "Jiffy Juicer."  Though china reamers had been produced in Europe years before, it wasn’t until 1927 when Goebel registered their German ceramics and chinaware in the U.S. Though Goebel didn't begin making ceramic juicers in the U.S. until the late 1920s, ceramic reamers had been produced in America from 1910 and continued through 1938. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, the production of colored glass reamers had declined. 

The end of the reamer era occurred in 1939 as frozen orange juice hit grocer’s freezers.  Today, glass and ceramic reamers are the most popular with collectors.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

 

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. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about art glass in the 2022 Summer Edition, with the theme "Splendor in the Glass," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

The Strength of Iron with the Hardness of Stone

 

QUESTION: My grandmother collected all sorts of odds and ends of antique china. Among all the pieces she had were a half dozen plates and jugs that had a special quality about them. She called them her stoneware and said they were probably from the early 19th century. Three of them had the name “Spode” on the back or bottom. Two were pure white with no decoration while the others had Chinese scenes painted on them. Can you tell me anything about them and when they would have been made?

ANSWER: The pieces your grandmother called “stoneware” are actually “ironstone,” a form of china with the look of porcelain. Ironstone china is a hard earthenware similar to porcelain. Although it has the hardness and fine surface of porcelain, it’s opaque while porcelain is transparent when held up to a light. 

Josiah Spode II first made ironstone in 1805. But before that, Miles Mason had been experimenting with a china formula that reproduced the appearance of Chinese porcelain. In 1813, Mason’s son, Charles, took out a patent, listing it as an improvement on ironstone china. Both Spode’s and Mason’s ironstone were equally fine. The blue-white color of both of their wares, as well as their patterns, were  imitations of Chinese wares.

Spode used his ironstone as a way to copy Lowestoft patterns. Lowestoft was a soft-paste porcelain produced in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, made from 1757 to 1802. It was mostly used for pots, teapots, and jugs, with shapes copied from silverwork or from Bow and Worcester porcelain. The English nobility had their initialed tableware made in China but getting replacements was a slow process, so they called upon English potters to make them.

While these pieces usually had no marks, they sometimes had the name “Spode” impressed in small letters on their bottoms. These patterns included crests and coats of arms and initials in shields with borders of small floral or leaf patterns or delicate ribbons.

One of Spode’s early ironstone patterns, commonly known as “Tree of Life,” is a design of the famille rose type, painted in blue, green, yellow, brown and pink. The mark appeared in black with the name “Spode” set on a rectangle of fretwork.

Patterns on Spode’s Lowestoft also included Queen Charlotte’s pattern, selected for Her Majesty’s visit to the Spode factory in 1817. Decorated in blue, it featured a butterfly border and a Chinese landscape in the center. It was a version of the old willow pattern that was popular on Chinese wares.

Though Spode copied many of his patterns from imported Chinese wares, he adapted others by making them more elaborate than their Chinese originals. Two types of old Chinese porcelain influenced Spode. The first was the old blue-and-white Nankin designs with pagoda and landscape and the butterfly border. The second was the famille rose design of the Yung Cheng period 1734. These patterns were in polychrome with gold and had floral and bird motifs. However, Spode didn’t use these patterns exclusively on his ironstone.

Spode marked the pattern numbers in red on his ironstone in addition to the factory mark. Lower numbers indicate an early production date, enabling pieces to be placed within certain years even if the exact date cannot be identified.

Eventually, Spode’s ironstone came in a variety of patterns. The Cabbage pattern featured a large leaf and flowers. Printed in blue, workers then filled it in by hand in blue, gold, rose, and Chinese red. Another early pattern, Peacock, features birds and peonies in gold and other colors in the famille rose style with a border known as India edge.

Landscape was Spode’s most Chinese looking pattern. It featured Chinese figures in blue and gold in the border with a landscape of water and buildings painted in colors in the center. Bang-up, first produced in polychrome, was a pattern of Chinese flowers. Ship and Star featured a pattern of a ship, buildings and figures set in a center cartouche and has a star border printed in brown.

The pattern known as George IV, was first made for the Coronation of George IV on July 29, 1821. The center of the plate has a design of Chinese still-life motifs with flowers and vases in blue, Chinese red, and gold with a heavy border.  

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "The World of Art Nouveau" in the 2022 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.