Know Everything About The Tin-Glazed Earthenware
English
potters were able to make a great advance in the seventeenth century.
They also imitate the art of pottery from other countries like Italy,
France, Holland and Germany. And many Dutch emigrants who came to
England brought the art and then it became popular in England.
Tin-glazed Earthenware
Sometime
before 1600, with help from Continental potters and in imitation of
Continental wares, English potters were able to make a great advance.
It was by using an opaque white glaze on which colored designs could
be painted; a method originating in Italy.
This type of
pottery, glazed with a composition based on oxide of tin, which was
available readily in England, is known as delftware from the similar
ware made at Delft in Holland; although the latter town did not
become connected with pottery-making
until some time after English manufacture had started. The beginner
has to beware of confusing English delftware with Dutch Delftware; a
confusion that is not restricted to the verbal sense. For, it was
emigrant Dutch potters who came to England and started making
tin-glazed earthenware in the second half of the sixteenth century.
The first
Dutch potters settled at Norwich, but nothing of their work has been
identified positively. The earliest ware of the type is a series of
brightly colored jugs, named after the village in Kent where one was
once kept in the church, West Mailing, near Maid stone. One of these
'Malling' jugs has a silver mount dated 1550, and others bear later
dates between then and 1600.
Queen
Elizabeth I was petitioned by two Dutch potters, named Jaspar Andries
and Jacob Janson, to allow them to settle and work in England, and it
is believed that Janson set up a pottery in London in 1571. An early
English dated piece of pottery now in the London Museum is a dish
painted in colors with what appears to be the Tower of London, the
date 1600, and an inscription reading 'The Rose is Red The Leaves are
Grene God Save Elizabeth Our Queene'. It seems probable that this is
of London manufacture but the colors used and style of painting are
very like those on ware made on the Continent at the time.
A further
surviving group of wares is dated about 1630, and consists of a
number of mugs bearing English names and of shapes unlike current
foreign types. Whereas these and earlier wares show, if anything, an
Italian influence in the style and coloring
of their decoration, the productions that followed were copied as
closely as possible from Chinese porcelain; which by 1640-50 was
coming to England in sufficient quantity to be a serious rival. Not
only was Oriental porcelain being brought to England, but the other
countries of Europe also imported it and their potteries in turn set
out to imitate the newcomer.
It is clear
that with pottery being made in England by Dutch potters copying
Chinese originals and the same subjects being copied by the Dutch in
their own country, it cannot be an easy matter to distinguish between
the two wares. No English wares are marked, and it is agreed that
only those of the seventeenth century of certain types and bearing
English names or inscriptions can be accepted reasonably as
originating in London.
Some rulers
like Queen Elizabeth I petitioned two Dutch potters and allowed them
to settle and work in England. There were a lot of imitations of the
arts of pottery making in the different parts of England. And it is
not easy to distinguish the original and the imitated wares. And some
of the wares were not marked. |
