Tea bowl

Object Type
This standard type of bowl for drinking tea, with a small bowl, neat foot and slightly flared rim, was copied directly from Chinese porcelain. It would have been matched with a rather wide saucer.

Design & Designing
As this distinctive moulded pattern is found on other salt-glazed stoneware tea services, it is apparent that whole matching services were made as early as the 1740s. Although modern collectors have managed to reconstruct some of these early services, no original set survives.

Materials & Making
A flaring bowl form was ideally suited to the technique of slip-casting, which was introduced into the Staffordshire potteries around 1740: for the object could be made in an open, single-piece plaster mould, where it would dry, shrink and detach itself for removal. Few pieces of salt-glazed stoneware better illustrate the extreme thinness which this technique made possible. Not only was a minimum of clay used, but the objects could be mass-produced by semi-skilled labour. Of the disadvantages, the main one was perhaps the rather rough surface of the finished piece - a problem later faced by the Victorians regarding other media, with their extensive use of cast-iron and pressed-glass. The problem in all these cases was solved by using all-over decoration to mask the poor surface. This in turn added to the demand for original designs, with some fairly mixed results.