Delft and dress at Deerfield.(tin-glazed earthenware exhibition)(Brief Article)

T in-glazed earthenware originated in the Near East around the ninth century and was being made in the Low Countries in the early sixteenth century. Delft was a center of production, and after 1567, when the Flemish potters Jasper Andries and Jacob Janson emigrated to Norwich, it was produced in England. The center for delft production in England moved to London, where Janson was granted a privilege to make tiles and drug jars in 1571. The delft industry grew in Southwark, and by 1640 there were some forty potters working there, many of them Dutch immigrants. After 1660 some potters removed to Lambeth on the south side of the Thames River, and by the eighteenth century there were manufactories in Brislington, Bristol, and Liverpool, and in Glasgow, Scotland, and Belfast, Ireland.

Delft was the most common form of imported ceramics owned in early America, and in 1771, the Delftfield factory of Glasgow alone exported 64,077 pieces of tin-glazed earthenware and stoneware to the American colonies.

Historic Deerfield in Deerfield, Massachusetts, has a large and rich collection of Dutch and English delftware, A selection of 175 pieces from its collection, amplified by 25 objects on loan from a private collector, comprise the exhibition entitled Delicate Deception: Delftware at Historic Deerfield, 1600- 1800, which is on view at the Flynt Center of Early New England Life from September 15 through August 2002. The show is organized according to the various forms and intended uses of these ceramics: dining, alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, health and beauty, lighting, ornamental wares, storage containers, commemorative pieces, and flower containers.

Thanks to the recent research conducted by Historic Deer-field's associate curator, Amanda E. Lange, we know that colonial china and glass merchants offered a wide array of delftware. ...