Philadelphia as depicted on ceramics. (Current and Coming).

Between about 1820 and 1860 potters in Staffordshire, England, saw an opportunity to profit from a surge of national pride in the United States. These astute manufacturers exported a wide variety of affordable table-wares with transfer-printed decoration ranging from depictions of American notables and landscapes to important historical events and noteworthy public buildings, all of which were derived from contemporary paintings, prints, and drawings. Demand for these wares abated before the Civil War but soon antiquarians and collectors began to search out examples of these patriotic ceramics. This was in large part due to the nostalgia for our historical past that followed the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876.

In 1878 in an unsigned preface to The China Hunters Club (thought to be by Alfred Coxe Prime), the writer accurately predicted that pieces of what had come to be known as historical blue Staffordshire would become highly sought after by collectors. Indeed, in 1892, when some examples of these ceramics were scarcely half a century old, Alice Morse Earle wrote China Collecting in America, in which she sorted out not only the manufacturer's marks found on these wares, but also compiled a geographically arranged list of more than one hundred different views and other historical subjects she had encountered. In 1939 Ellouise Baker Larsen published her remarkable book American Historical Views on Staffordshire China, in which she identified nearly seven hundred subjects, and this book, several revised editions later, remains the bible for collectors of these wares.

Two private collections of historical ...