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Teapot
Unknown - Enlarge image
Teapot
- Place of origin:
Staffordshire, England (made)
- Date:
ca. 1750 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Unknown (production)
- Materials and Techniques:
Salt-glazed stoneware, slip-cast
- Credit Line:
Given by Dr J. C. Padwick
- Museum number:
C.199&A-1926
- Gallery location:
British Galleries, room 52b, case 2
Object Type
Most English earthenware teapots of the first half of the 18th century were very small. This reflected the high cost of tea rather than its popularity, since by mid-century it was being drunk throughout the land by socially ambitious people of limited means.
Design & Designing
When slip-casting and press-moulding were introduced to Staffordshire around 1740, the new trade of block-maker came into being in order to make the master-blocks from which all subsequent disposable plaster moulds could be made. The sources of their early designs were many and various, and also often mildly eccentric: 17th-century prints of life in China and tea cultivation, bas-relief scenes of the taking of Portobello by Admiral Edward Vernon in 1740, exotic animals such as camels and, as here, a gaunt house of the type built by successful master potters around Burslem in the Staffordshire Potteries. The addition of a serpent spout has done little to harmonise the whole design.
