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Between about 1790 and the late 1820s, potters around Leeds and nearby towns in Yorkshire were producing charming teapots like the one illustrated above. Made of highly fired feldspathic white stoneware with elaborate molded decoration and often blue outlining, these distinctive pots are known generally as Castleford-type, for the pottery of that name established by David Dunderdale near Leeds where many were made. Large numbers were produced for export--to the Continent, particularly Spain, and to the young United States. The pot illustrated here, recently acquired by the American Museum in Britain in Bath, England, is an example of those made for the American market, bearing a liberty head on one side and an eagle with thirteen stars on the other. Research conducted by Diana Edwards Roussel many years ago strongly indicated that pieces with such American symbolic decoration were not made by the Castleford pottery but by the pottery established by Robert Sowter in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, in 1800.

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Even the most sumptuously set dinners today pale in comparison to those that included such objects as the magnificent monteith and wine cistern illustrated on this page, creations of early English silversmiths. The monteith (center) was made by the royal goldsmith George Garthorne in 1688 as an expensive and ostentatious tribute to the success of the Royal African Company, which had exclusive rights to the African slave trade from its founding in 1672 until 1698. The coat of arms of the Royal African Company are engraved on the central panel, while the other panels are decorated with fanciful scenes of equally exotic Chinese warriors and sages. The decoration is ascribed to an anonymous engraver whose hand has been identified on approximately eighteen monteiths of the period. A silver tazza bearing the Royal African Company arms and made the same year as the ...