In the shelburned tradition.(Museum accessions)

Of all the important early collectors of Americana, Electra Havemeyer Webb was the one who most valued prosaic things, beginning with her childhood dolls right up to the steamboat she acquired in maturity. She was also one of the first to open her collections to the public. It is said that her display of pink Staffordshire plates on an American pine dresser in the eighteenth-century brick house at Shelburne, Vermont, visited by Henry Francis du Pont in 1923, was one of the major inspirations for his undertaking his own American house project at Winterthur. Some of the newly acquired objects that can be seen at the Shelburne Museum this summer are very much in keeping with this tradition.

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The striking Staffordshire hot water pot shown above is a rough cousin to the "cauliflower ware" often associated with Wedgwood and others in the north of England. Here we find a pear-shape pot of thrown "melon ware" with a cauliflower knop. (Both kinds of ware were modeled after nature and glazed to imitate the relevant fruits and vegetables.) The pattern of tightly spaced dots rouletted to the surface of the jug creates a rind-like texture; and next to the scroll handle, molded as a single leaf, is an applied flower and leaf decoration. In contrast to the pot's mundane purpose, its appearance is bright and showy. Another such unusual pot is in the Weldon Collection at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, where there are two similar smaller jugs as well. A teapot in this fashion is in the Norwich Castle Museum in England. No precise date or maker has yet been found for this small elusive group of earthenware.

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Electra Webb began ...