Tea for Two or More

QUESTION: I recently started going to antique shows. I’m new to antique collecting and find the whole thing fascinating. On a trip to a recent local show, I saw several unusual boxes. The dealers told me they were tea caddies. All of them had locks. Can you tell me a little about these unique boxes? I’d love to collect them, but they seemed rather pricey.

ANSWER: Tea caddies are one of the more unique items available to antique collectors. They’re good to collect because they don’t take up too much room, but their age and quality can make them prohibitively expensive, especially for the beginning collector. Before discussing tea caddies, themselves, it’s important to know how the tea trade began and why each of the caddies had locks.

People have been drinking tea since 2737 BC, when, according to legend, a few leaves from a nearby tree blew into Chinese Emperor Shen Nung's pot of boiling water. Apparently, the Emperor took a sip of the  brew, only to discover that it was both delicious and refreshing.

Tea brewing and drinking evolved into a ritualistic exercise. During the Ming Dynasty from 1368 to 1644, people brewed the delicate leaves in vessels with lids in which they steeped them in boiled water. Early 17th-century Dutch and Portuguese silk and spice traders tried to introduce Chinese tea to Europe, but it took time to catch on. Even the English, known for their love of a "cuppa," waited until the mid-17th century before trying it. Since tea was expensive, only the aristocracy could afford to drink it.

People believed it was therapeutic as well as delicious. Asians had known the health benefits of tea for thousands of years. And even though Portugal and Holland imported tea 50 years ahead of England, tea remained a precious commodity, so people used it sparingly.

The first recorded sale of tea in England occurred in 1657. At first it was available only in apothecaries, coffee houses, snuff shops and through shops catering for ladies needs. However by the second half of the 18th century smuggled tea was so widely available, that even respectable people bought it illegally for less money.

William Pitt tried to address this problem in his Commutation Act of 1784, which reduced taxes on tea and halved its price. The legitimate imports quadrupled making tea more accessible to a wider section of society.

It wasn’t until the 1750s that tea caddies became a home style accessory. The word caddy derives from the Malay word "kati," meaning a measure of weight about 3/5 of a kilo. The 17th century tea containers were bottle shaped tea jars in china, glass, silver, enamel and straw-work covered metal.

Cabinetmakers began to make tea caddies out of wood in box form beginning in the late 1820s. The made the first ones of mahogany in the shape of small chests which contained three metal canisters. They generally came in two styles—simple and ornate.

Both styles shared certain characteristics. Both had handles on top and stood on either bracket feet or a plinth-style base. They had stepped lids and molding of some sort along the edges. Usually, these caddies had straight sides. The fancier tea caddies often had gilded brass mounts and feet. As time went on, cabinetmakers introduced new designs, woods and shapes to their caddies.

Tea caddies came in three sizes—single, double, and triple.

Single caddies could be square, polygonal, oval, or elliptical and sometimes  urn-shaped. Tops were mostly flat with sometimes a small loop handle or finial in the center. Escutcheons of inlaid ivory, bone or boxwood surrounded the keyhole. Inside they had a free standing lid. Sometimes, the tops were shaped like pyramids, continuing the proportions of the side panels.

Double caddies were usually oblong sometimes octagonal or oval. They had two lids, or two removable canisters with hinged tops. Some had one lid and a space for a glass bowl that people usually used for storing sugar. Others had a second bowl for mixing the blend of tea.

Triple caddies had either two lids, three lids, two canisters, three canisters or two lids or canisters flanking a space in the center for a glass bowl. They had rectangular shapes and rarely contained two glass jars and a bowl.

Cabinetmakers covered the more elaborate tea caddies in luxurious veneers. Cutting veneers by hand was a highly skilled job. The veneers were much thicker than those used today. This created a problem because moisture could be absorbed into the veneer’s edge. To solve this problem, cabinetmakers edged their caddies with strips of contrasting plain wood, usually holly or boxwood or in herringbone designs.

Caddies made of plainer mahogany often had marquetry decoration. Makers inserted per-made panels, mostly of oval shape, of marquetry or penwork enhanced marquetry, onto the box by cutting the veneer to the required shape. The most common designs were in the Neoclassical style of flora, urns, garlands, paterae, lyres, stylized baskets, birds and mythical beings.

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An American Grocery Tradition

QUESTION: I live in a small apartment and don’t have the room or means to collect a lot of antiques, especially furniture. But recently I became fascinated with the little tins that contained spices and other things that used to be sold in supermarkets. I’ve acquired some, like those from A&P and National. While I’ve heard of some of these brands, I’ve never seen or heard of the National brand. Can you tell me anything about it?

ANSWER: The use of little tins to hold spices goes back to the late 19th century. McCormick spices are widely known as a national brand, but each market and eventually supermarket had its own store brands, as just about all do today. So first let’s look at how these store brands got started.

It all began back in 1859 when John Huntingdon Hartford founded the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, commonly known as A&P. He peddled coffees and teas out of gold and vermillion horse-drawn wagons and tiny, yet opulent, Oriental-themed retail shops before gradually adding a few kitchen staples like flour, sugar, baking powder and spices to its product mix. He packaged the items he sold with the name of his company, A&P.

Clarence Saunder started the modern self-service supermarket concept in 1916 with his Memphis-based Piggly Wiggly brand. One of the earliest tea companies to break from tradition and cash in on this concept was Danish immigrant George S. Rasmussen's National Tea Company, founded in 1899. Others like Jewel Tea followed. In the beginning, each sold their own brand of goods, but as the small stores grew into supermarkets, each needed to fill their shelves, so they began selling private brands as well.

Early in its history, Chicago-based National built itself into an upper Midwest chain supermarket powerhouse across Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota by hitching its future on adopting Saunder's novel supermarket concept. By the end of World War II, National had grown into America's sixth largest grocery chain, comprising 880 small, neighborhood supermarkets sprinkled across Iowa, the Dakotas, Michigan and Indiana, but primarily concentrated around principal strongholds in Chicago, Rockford, Illinois, Milwaukee and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

But following founder Rasmussen's [936 death during the Great Depression, National lost its direction and floundered. Chicago millionaire printer John F. Cunco, who controlled a 26 percent block of stock in what he publicly noted was the worst chain-store property in the country, forced a March 1945 reorganization of the company's management to shake up the laggard, star-crossed chain. Cunco installed fifth-grade dropout-turned-grocery-whiz Harley V. McNamara as National's executive vice-president and Robert V. Rasmussen, son of the founder, as president. In 1947 McNamara was promoted to president, with Rasmussen becoming chairman.

Within a decade of his 1945 appointment at National, McNamara built the industry also-ran into the nation's fifth largest supermarket chain and 10th largest retailer, boosting sales from $107 million to $520 million and profits from $913,000 to $6.5 million by increasing per-store volume some 500 percent. He did this by closing its low-volume, low-profit traditional city neighborhood stores  in favor of the postwar shift to larger, modern stand-alone and shopping center supermarkets surrounded by acres of free parking.

But by far the biggest single reason for National's explosive growth during the postwar boom was McNamara's strategy of buying instant market saturation in new geographic areas though the acquisition of local chains in major markets. Still the chain continued to sell its National store brand and placed its items in these acquired stores. Sound familiar?

Eventually, the economy and over-expansion caught up to National while other, newer chains created competition it just couldn’t match. Today, even the trendiest supermarkets offer their own brand of many of the products they sell. And as supermarket chains get bought and sold, the store brands of the survivors endure. It’s an American tradition.

How About a Cuppa?

QUESTION: My mother collected cups and saucers from dinnerware sets for years. She was also a great tea drinker. Recently, she died and now I have her collection. I don’t collect much of anything but I do like the variety she amassed in her collection. Why did she get so much pleasure from collecting all these different cups and saucers and what did that have to do with her liking tea?

ANSWER: Cups and saucers have a deep and historic connection to drinking tea. For collectors, they’re one of the easiest items to collect in all price ranges. Some people collect them from different makers, others collect different designs, and still others collect historically significant ones. Whatever the reason, cups and saucers are one of the most popular collectibles.

To understand how they are connected to tea drinking, we have to go back to 1800 when Joseph Spode invented the formula for bone china, a delicate but durable white porcelain to which he added finely ground animal bone. Spode decorated his first bone china teabowls (handleless cups) and saucers in brightly colored enamels and often gilded them. He copied many floral, figural, and landscape designs from the Chinese.

The earliest tea sets were copies of Chinese ones. Since the Chinese drank only lukewarm tea, the user could grip the cup, thus no handle was necessary. Cups from early tea sets had no handle. At the beginning of the 19th century, people began “saucering” their tea, or pouring some into the saucer to cool, then sipping it from the saucer. But eventually, this method went out of style. After that all cups had handles.

The English are great tea drinkers and created the daily ritual of “afternoon tea.”  An important part of this ritual is the cup and saucer, the more beautiful and delicate the better.  The need for these vessels encourage the production of numerous cups and saucers by English potteries. Many of them produced bone china dinnerware and exported  their products to the United States and Canada. During the 19th century, It became fashionable for young brides to collect sample cups and saucers from different sets.

Royal  Crown Derby richly gilded its "Imari" pattern and decorated it in the reds and blues of Japanese Imari ware. Minton produced beautiful hand-painted ring handles and butterfly handled bone china teacups highly prized by collectors. Doulton's Burslem factory made fine bone china cups decorated in gold with elaborate designs. Other companies, such as Aynsley, Foley, Crown Staffordshire and Royal Albert, produced bone china dinnerware with colorful transfer decorations.

Highly treasured by advanced collectors are the exquisite cabinet cups and saucers made by the leading porcelain factories in Europe in the 18th and 19th century. Women considered these lovely cups and saucers to be works of art and proudly displayed them in their cabinets.

Sevres produced magnificent cabinet cups and saucers with hand-painted portrait panels and richly gilt border designs, many in the "blue roi" color. Vienna Company developed a similar color in the 18th century, and today this cobalt blue shade is still a favorite with collectors. Both Vienna and KPM decorated their cabinet cups and saucers with magnificent reproductions of paintings by famous artists, such as Kauffman, as well as with beautiful florals and much gilding.

Cups and saucers from the elegant dinnerware services of the 19th and early 20th centuries are lovely to collect and offer good value. "Top-of-the-line" are cups and saucers from Meissen dessert sets, many with reticulated borders and multicolored hand-painted flowers. The best known and most copied porcelain decoration created by Meissen is the Blue Onion pattern, first designed in the early 18th century. Meissen based it on a Chinese pattern from the Ming Dynasty, and it got its name from a stylized peach that resembled an onion. More than 60 European and Oriental companies used this decoration, and many cup and saucer collectors hunt for examples of the different "onion" styles.

The most popular dinnerware in the mid to late 19th century was Limoges porcelain. Limoges was the center of hard paste porcelain production in France, and many companies exported dinnerware to America. Collectors actively seek cups and saucers from these sets because they offer a tremendous variety of shapes and decoration and are usually very affordable. Collectors look for the hand-painted examples. Floral decor, especially the rose, is the most frequent decoration followed by fruit themes, game birds and fish. Some cups and saucers have deep, vivid colors, while others, especially by Theodore Haviland, have delicate pastel coloring. Collectors prize many of them  because of their rich gold embellishments.

You can easily add to your mother’s collection. But before you do so, you should take an inventory by studying the marks on the bottoms of the cups and saucers. Try to see if she collected cups and saucers from certain companies or whether she collected them by design. Then decide how you would like to collect them. Don’t be afraid of selling or giving away pieces that my be slightly damaged or not in styles that you like. And while your mother may have left you her collection, it’s your collection now.

Biscuit Tins Never Get Stale

QUESTION: I’ve inherited my mother’s collection of English biscuit tins. She had been collecting them since she made a trip to England at the end of the 1960s. Her collection includes over four dozen tins, some are fancier than others. I love these old tins and want to continue collecting them. When my mother began collecting, she had to buy them during several trips to England. But today, I figure I can purchase them online. Can you tell me more about their history? Also, do you think I can add to her collection?

ANSWER: Biscuit tins are a fascinating part of British cultural history. They’re even tied to the monarchy. And while today manufacturers don’t make them as fancy as some of the ones from the early part of the 20th century, they’re still very popular with collectors. The peak of biscuit tin production ran from the late 1890s to the 1930s. Though originally meant to hold biscuits—the British term for “cookies”—they eventually became collectible works of art in themselves.

The history of the biscuit tin began with the passing of the Licensed Grocer’s Act of 1861 which allowed groceries to be individually packaged and sold. This coincided with the removal of the duty on paper for printed labels, so printing directly on to tinplate became common.

The bakery of Huntley & Palmers pioneered the use of metal tins. In 1832, Joseph Huntley’s son, who founded Huntley, Boorne & Stevens in an ironmongers opposite the bakery, began handcrafting large square seven- to ten-pound tins with glass inset tops for retailers. Grocery store clerks would measure out the amount of biscuits from these tins and place them in a paper bag for the customer. However, they didn’t stay fresh for very long once the customer returned home.

So Joseph Huntley began creating smaller tins without the glass insets so that customers could purchase their biscuits in a container to keep them fresh which they could take home. The tins were of such excellent quality that people began to reuse them to hold other things. The tins needed decoration but the only way to do that at the time was to paint them by hand.

In the early 1860s, all that changed with the invention of direct tin printing. This was a complicated and time-consuming technique. Then along came London printer Benjamin George George (That isn’t a typo.), who invented the lithographic transfer method.

In 1868, Huntley & Palmers commissioned the first lithographically decorated tin using George’s method from the London firm of De La Rue. Buckingham Palace granted the bakery permission to supply biscuits to the Royal Family. In order to create an appropriate design befitting the Royal Family, they hired Victorian designer Owen Jones to create a pattern which they could use on the biscuit tins using George’s new method. The result was a richly decorated oblong tin with the Royal Coat of Arms on the lid, now known to collectors as the “Ben George tin.” 

But George’s direct lithographic process, which involved laying an inked stone directly on to a sheet of tin, made it difficult to line up the colors. The breakthrough in decorative tin plate production was the invention of the offset lithographic process in 1877, which consists of bringing a sheet of rubber into contact with the decorated stone, and then setting-off the impression so obtained upon the metal surface. With this method, printers could use any number of colors, position them correctly, and apply the design to an uneven surface if necessary. Thus the elaborately embossed, colorful designs that became a hallmark of late Victorian biscuit tins became technically possible.

It became possible to make tins in almost any shape imaginable. Biscuit lovers bought baskets, windmills, cars, locomotives, globes, tables, and even mailboxes as much for their decorative qualities as their contents. Between 1868 and the outbreak of World War II, Huntley & Palmers issued around 400 tin designs with a lots of variations.

The most exotic designs appeared in the early years of the 20th century, just prior to the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s, costs had risen substantially and the design of biscuit tins tended to be more conservative, with the exception of those targeted at the Christmas market and intended to appeal to children.

One of the most unique and most popular of biscuit tin designs resembled a stack of books held together with a belt. This 1901 Huntley & Palmers tin, known as “Literature,” was so realistically done that the covers and spines of the books appear to have been deeply tooled and inked and the page edges convincingly marbled and swirled in a rainbow of colors.

Most popular, however, were the tins shaped like vehicles. It was no coincidence that car, train, airplane, and boat tins bore a striking resemblance to similar toys sold at British department and toy stores since toy companies often crafted them from the same molds they used for their products. An example is Carr & Co's double-decker bus tin, made especially for them by Chad Valley and virtually identical to Chad Valley's toy bus except for the internal clockwork mechanism and different advertising.

But Huntley and Palmers were by no means the only company that made unusual biscuit tins. Some of the other famous biscuit tin sellers were Carr & Company., William Crawford & Sons, MacFarlane, Land & Company., and Peek, Frean, and Company. 

During the Second World War, all production on biscuit tins stopped so that factories and materials could be used for the war effort. When the war ended in 1945, production resumed but the tins weren’t as popular as before the war.

Peek, Frean, and Company, McVitie’s, and Jacob’s all became household names but for collectors Huntley & Palmers stands out. Collectors are particularly attracted to the decorative novelty tins. Condition is of prime importance, perhaps even more so with biscuit tins since they rust easily. Many also become worn or dented, giving the novice collector an opportunity to acquire interesting examples relatively cheaply.

Today, biscuit tins range in price from $10 to $200 online. However, the prices of those in British antiques shops are climbing into the stratosphere. This is due mostly to the antiques tourist trade. The most expensive tin sold at auction for over $20,000.

Tear and Paste

QUESTION: I just purchased a beautiful antique papier-mâché tray at a large antique show. I’ve never seen anything like it before. In fact, I never knew that furnishings and accessories were made of papier-mâché. I still remember making things out of papier-mâché as a kid in school. Is this the same process? If so, it must have taken a long time to make this tray. What can you tell me about it?

ANSWER: Yes, for nearly 100 years papier-mâché furnishings and accessories were all the rage. And, no, the process is a bit different from the sculptures you made in art class when you were a kid.

People don’t often think of papier-mâché when they think of furniture and accessories. But, in fact, it was very popular, especially at the beginning of the 19th century. Papier-mâché is quintessentially Victorian.

Its origins date back to 17th-century England when craftsmen first used a compound of plaster mixed with organic matter such as straw, bark, or nettles to create molded architectural ornaments. The idea was for the frugal decorator to use these prefabricated cornices and rosettes instead of hiring a plaster craftsman.

By the early 18th century, cabinetmakers began using papier-mâché to decorate the frames of looking glasses, chairs, tables. But its main application remained architectural.
               
Beginning in the last quarter of the 18th century, manufacturers began turning out a range of accessories. Trays were popular through the early decades of the 19th century,  Makers produced tea trays, in particular, in great numbers, in response to the spread of tea drinking among the English middle class.

From the beginning, makers japanned papier-mâché housewares by covering them with a hard varnish imitation of Asian lacquer. At first, they kept the decoration simple, with a black or red ground embellished with a guilt border. But in the 1790's they covered the entire surface. Not surprisingly, Chinese scenes were popular. A typical example of this fanciful Oriental taste are the gilt and black trays featuring a painting of a Chinese couple standing by a pagoda. Trays like this have sold for over $6000.

Collectors highly value Regency papier-mâché. One of the finest pieces to come on the market in recent years was a Chinoiserie tray that sold at auction for $24,000. However, this tray didn’t have the black faux-lacquer ground, but instead it had a brightly painted landscape—a rocky topography shaded by willow trees, pagoda-like structures, and men wearing pointy hats. In this case, the artist went overboard with cliches of Oriental life. This decoration form is attributed to Henry Clay, who was the most prominent papier-mâché manufacturer at the time.

Clay promoted papier-mâché as a new material on which to paint. Another tray bearing Clay’s stamp had an overall floral design on a black ground. The lush realism of this tray showed the high level of skill of the industry’s painters. It sold for nearly $3500.
                               
Clay was also a pioneer in manufacturing papier-mâché furniture.  He undertook a series of experiments in durability that resulted in a much stronger material. His experiments enabled papier-mache to be sewn and dovetailed, just like wood.

The firm of Jennens and Bettridge, which took over Clays business in 1816, continued to find new uses for papier-mâché. They expanded the traditional repertoire of salvers and snuff boxes to include the whole suites of chairs, and even piano casings.  Even though papier-mâché was sturdy, manufacturers still thought it prudent to build the seating furniture around a wooden frame.

Jennens and Bettridge developed the use of mother-of-pearl in the decoration of papier-mâché.  Since they patented their technique in 1825, the date makes a useful dividing line in trying to date.

It can be a challenge to find papier-mâché pieces in good condition. But they’re easy to recognize, with their japanned surface and painted floral motifs, highlighted by mother-of-pearl inlay. Though a piece may appear in a high-end antique shop from time to time, collectors find most at middle to high-end antique shows.

A Spoonful of Memories

QUESTION: I was recently going through a box of junk that belonged to my grandfather and in it I discovered a silver spoon with the name Rolex on the handle. It had the Rolex crown at the top with the word Rolex under it. On the back it said Bucherer Switzerland. It this any affiliation with the watch company? What can you tell me about this spoon?

ANSWER: You found a Rolex souvenir spoon, given to the purchaser of a Rolex watch from Bucherer Jewelers in Lucerne, Switzerland. Customers only received one of these spoons after they bought a Rolex. Bucherer never sold the spoons separately.

Besides its main store in Lucerne, Buckerer has outlets in major luxury hotels in other cities. These hotels often gave their guests silverplated Rolex spoons as a welcome gift, hoping that they would purchase a Rolex to take home. Though Rolex Geneva wholly endorses the marketing effort by Bucherer, the company doesn’t make the spoons.

The spoons feature the names of eight different cities—Lucerne, Lugano, Basel, Zurich, Interlaken, Geneva, and others—where Bucherer has a store. The Lucerne spoon is the most common. The one marked "New York" and with a Statue of Liberty motif is the hardest to find because Bucherer no longer has a New York City store. The jewelry company has been handing out the Rolex spoons since the 1950s.

Because there are thousands of these silver-plated spoons available, they usually sell for under $15, with the older, rarer examples selling for $25-35.

Sterling silver and silver-plated souvenir spoons have been around since the late 16th century in Europe. The first ones served as religious souvenirs. Made of either silver or gold and often encrusted with jewels, they also served as a form of currency.

The first souvenir spoons in the United States acted as first gifts to babies by their sponsors at christenings. The idea was that a child no sooner learned to feed himself, using his own spoon, than he began to acquire knowledge.

In 1887, as souvenir spoons became the fad in European cities, Daniel Low, of Salem, Mass., made a trip to Europe where he purchased spoons from skilled craftsmen. From these, he conceived the idea of a spoon showing the traditions and legends of Salem. His son, Seth F. Low, designed the first "witch" spoon. Its handle carries the figure of a witch, the word "Salem," and three witch pins similar to those
preserved in the courthouse at Salem.

Low’s witch spoon launched the souvenir spoon craze of the late 19th-century in this country. It was the first to be made in this country from a special die, of a design suggestive of some particular place.

Victorian women loved serving tea and used souvenir spoons whenever they had guests. The spoons also served as conversation pieces with after-dinner coffee and other beverages. They also became badges of travel as Victorians began to travel and attend world expositions.

The Rolex spoons, however, fall into the advertising category. Displaying such a spoon indicates that the owner or someone in the home had purchased a Rolex watch, which for some is a status symbol in itself. 

Drinking With Both Hands

QUESTION: I recently purchased a lovely handleless cup and saucer at an antique show. The dealer couldn’t tell me much about it except that it’s called a tea bowl. It has a beautiful landscape scene on it in a sort of lavender color. What can you tell me about this piece?

ANSWER: What you have is indeed a transferware tea bowl, made in the Staffordshire area of England in the early to mid-19th century.

Before the development of the handled teacup, the British upper classes drank their tea from expensive imported Chinese porcelain tea bowls and saucers. Owning a porcelain cup became a mark of high social status. In fact, many members of British nobility posed for portraits holding their favorite cup and saucer. The teacup or bowl was so important that most people usually carried their own to parties in special leather and satin carrying cases.

The cup, as it's known today, with a handle on the side, wasn't introduced until the 18th century.
Prior to that, hostesses and servants poured tea into a cup with no handles. The person drinking the hot tea then poured it, in small amounts, into a deep saucer and sipped from the saucer. Pouring a small amount into the saucer allowed it to cool just the bit. Also, on cold winter days, the handless tea bowl acted as a hand warmer.

It wasn’t until Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode perfected the mass production of earthenware and porcelain did handled teacups become popular.

At about the same time, English pottery makers in the Staffordshire region introduced a new decorative method, known as  "decalcomania," in which workers applied printed decals or transfers onto  pottery and porcelain wares. This enabled potteries to produce cups and saucers carrying social, political,  and advertising slogans.

The process starts with an engraved copper plate similar to those used for making paper engravings.  The engraver traced the outline onto thin tissue paper and then reproduced it on a sheet of copper using homemade carbon paper. He engraved over this outline with a V-shaped groove and added the details and areas of shading using lines or dots. The idea of using dots, or stipple punching, rather than lines came later in the 18th century. The engraver found the right depth by trial and error, so he took a first print or proof before he reworked the lines and dots to deepen them if necessary. The deeper the engraving, the deeper the deposits of color, thus the darker the result. Engravers created early designs with lines and in uniform dark blue, but as the technique of engraving improved so engravers achieved different tonal qualities and printed in pink, green, lavender, brown, and black inks.

Workers, using inked copper plates would print the pattern onto tissue paper, which then transferred the wet ink to the white ceramic surface. They then fired the ceramic piece in a low temperature kiln to fix the pattern. This could be done over or under the glaze, but the underprinting method was more durable. The process produced fine lines similar to the engraved prints in old books. Before transfer printing, pottery workers handpainted the ceramics, a laborious and costly process.

During the printing process, the printer kept the plate warm by placing it on a circular iron plate or backstone. He then applied the ink to the copper plate, making sure to rub the ink into every dot and line. After scraping off the surplus color, he removed any film of color by rubbing the surface with a corduroy-faced pad. When the  copper plate was clean, he laid the tissue paper coated with a mixture of soft soap and water and passed it through the press's rollers. He then passed the printed image, now in reverse—unlike regular engravings that begin in reverse and appear correct on printing—on to the transfer team, consisting of the transferrer, apprentice, and cutter.

The cutter removed the excess paper leaving only the design pieces. The transferrer laid these pieces, colored by cobalt oxide, on to the ware after its first or biscuit firing, then dipped it in glaze and refired it. A design with an overall pattern would have the center applied first and the border around the rim afterwards. The tackiness of the oily print held it in place while the apprentice rubbed it down vigorously with a stiff-bristled brush using a little soft soap as lubricant.

The apprentice then soaked the earthenware in a tub of water to soften the paper, which he removed by sponging, the oil-based color being unaffected by the water. After drying, an assistant placed the ware into the hardening kiln to fire at 1,250-1,290 F. to remove the oils and secure the color. Afterwards, another worker glazed the piece and placed it into the kiln to be   refired at 1,940-2,010° F.

Engraving for transfer printing reached its peak by 1816. And by 1805, lighter shades of royal blue as well as ultramarine came into use. Though each factory developed its own potting and decorative techniques, considerable copying took place between factories. In addition, each factory experimented with different styles and products changed dramatically over a short time.
Not only did the paste and tone of the underglaze blue vary from factory to factory, but they also varied according to the stage of each factory's development.

To complicate matters, makers constantly introduced new patterns, while shapes of plates, dishes, tureens varied from time to time according to the prevailing trends. When the Chinese-inspired designs lost favor, manufacturers replaced them with European scenes, which they copied from engravings in books. Floral borders resembled each other in general appearance, although most differed in detail.

Today, transfer tea bowls are going for astronomical prices. One is excellent condition, with a perfectly matched design, can fetch upwards of $150-200 in an antique show or shop.

Chew, Chew...Spit

QUESTION: I found what looks like a small, shallow, porcelain vase at a fleamarket near my home. It’s almost too short to hold anything but flowers with very short stems and has a delicate floral design on the outside. Do you have any idea what this might be?

ANSWER: What you have is a ladies spit cup or spittoon. Chewing is one of the oldest ways of consuming tobacco. Native Americans chewed its leaves, often mixing it with lime. It became a popular pastime in the last decade of the 18th century and continued to be so until 1920. Today, the most visible evidence of tobacco chewing appears in baseball, but even that’s dying out as users succumb to throat cancer.

Though mostly men indulged in the habit of chewing tobacco, women, especially those in Victorian times, used it as well. In 1865, a traveler down South noted that seven-tenths of all people, both male and female,  over the age of 12 used tobacco in some form. Even children of 8 or 9 smoked. The habit increased in popularity after the Civil War as soldiers, who chewed tobacco to ease frazzled nerves on the battlefield, continued to do so after they came home.

Victorian women could chew and spit as well as men. These ladies usually abused tobacco and alcohol behind closed doors. And while they snuck outside and drank and smoked in the outhouse to avoid being caught by their husbands, they often chewed tobacco quietly around the house while doing their chores and needed something in which to deposit their spit.

After the Civil War, spittoons became a fixture in many places, including hotels, saloons, stores, and any other place where men chewing tobacco might congregate. These were large vessels made of brass or pottery with a broad rim into which the chewer tried to aim his spit, often with little success.

Woman, on the other hand, used a dainty spit cup—also called a lady’s cuspidor, toilette cup, or boudoir dish—to gracefully discard their sputum. Some looked like regular coffee or tea cups while others had fanciful shapes with fluted rims. Since ladies didn’t need to spit across the room, these cups often had decorative gold rims and base, and delicate, lady-like designs. Some came in the shape of little baskets or drawstring purses. English and French manufacturers, especially Limoges, made these lovely spit receptacles out of fine porcelain, and for plainer, everyday use, ironstone with flowered transferware patterns on both the inside and outside.

As chewing tobacco's popularity declined throughout the years, the spittoon became a relic. However, women found other uses for these cups. Pregnant women, who tended to salivate more, especially when they had nausea or heartburn, also used these cups. Even today, it’s common for Haitian women to carry around a spit cup while pregnant.