Plate

Object Type
One would certainly have thought that this late version of a tortoiseshell plate was made in the English Midlands, but archaeological evidence has shown that it was made at the Swinton Pottery in Yorkshire (the unique 'cock's tail' moulded border of the plate matches fragments excavated there). It would also have been thought to date 20 or 30 years earlier, tortoiseshell decoration being firmly associated with the Rococo style and not with Neo-classicism.

Materials & Making
Although the potteries in the Leeds area of Yorkshire were famed for their plain - and especially their pierced - creamwares, of the type perfected by the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood as 'Queen's Ware' in the 1760s, demand continued for other types of pottery. These included Pearlwares, with their blue-tinted glaze and sketchy blue-painted decoration; creamwares with a dark-brown underside copying earlier Chinese 'Batavian' wares (a type of brown-glazed Chinese porcelain, named after the Dutch trading post through which much of it passed on its way to Britain); and tortoiseshell decoration produced by sponging iron and manganese oxides onto the unglazed biscuit body. This last technique would have added considerably to the cost: an advertisement of the 1750s for tortoiseshell ware lists plates at four times the price of plain ones. There is no doubt, therefore, that there was a ready market - quite probably on the Continent - for these plates. By 1800, however, they must have appeared quite old fashioned.

People & Place
The Brameld family who worked the Swinton Pottery at Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, at this period followed the tradition of making enough money from producing good-quality earthenware in order to experiment with porcelain. By 1826, when the Swinton Pottery was renamed the Rockingham Works, 'Rockingham Work' pottery was making ambitious porcelains under the patronage of the landlord, William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam (1748-1833).