White Salt-Glazed Stoneware of the British Isles.(Book Review)

White Salt-Glazed Stoneware of the British Isles

Diana Edwards and Rodney Hampson Antique Collectors' Club, 45 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1 85149 4804

Hilary Young praises the way that the formidable difficulties confronting the study of white salt-glazed stoneware have been tackled--if not wholly overcome--in this comprehensive study White Salt-Glazed Stoneware of the British Isles

White salt-glazed stoneware was one of the most important ceramic products of eighteenth-century England. It was relatively cheap to produce, extremely durable and white-bodied, and hence able to rival the porcelains imported from China--on the tables of the 'middling classes' at least. First made in England by John Dwight in Fulham during the 1680s, it was then taken up in the 1710s by Staffordshire potters, who soon after made the key innovation of mixing calcined flint in roughly equal measure with white-firing clay.

This combination of materials was one of two major technical developments that transformed the Staffordshire industry, as it enabled the large-scale production of finely potted teawares and tablewares--first in salt-glaze and subsequently in creamware--that won Staffordshire enthusiastic markets both at home and abroad. Manufacture of white 'flintware' rapidly spread to other parts of the country, but north Staffordshire remained overwhelmingly the most important centre of production.

Flint had been added to whiten and strengthen the clay body, but this fortified material also proved perfectly suited to the slip-casting technique, which was re-introduced around 1740. This relied on the use of hollow plaster moulds, and the adoption of such plaster piece-moulds for casting and moulding was the second great technical leap forward that transformed the Staffordshire industry, as it made possible the reproduction of complex shapes in bulk.

Salt-glaze potters were the first to fully exploit this potential, most notably in their wonderfully inventive teapots of the 1740s-50s formed as camels, houses and the like, in which one can sense the potters' excitement at being liberated from the restrictions of the wheel. However, the widespread adoption of hollow moulds made factories increasingly reliant on specialist modellers for their designs. Such modellers often worked freelance, supplying identical models to a number of manufacturers--and this brings us to one of the central problems that the authors of this book faced.