Jug

Object Type
Large Staffordshire earthenware jugs of this type were usually matched with basins, for use on a washstand. This example, not as large as many, may perhaps have been intended for general kitchen use.

People
Marie-Joseph du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), was a veteran of the American War of Independence. He led the French forces and George Washington the Americans when, in combination in the autumn of 1781, they besieged the British army at Yorktown, Virginia, which resulted in a disastrous British surrender and, within two years, the end of the war. In 1824 La Fayette was invited by the Americans to visit the 24 states of its comparatively new republic. Links between France and America were still strong, both countries having thrown off the yoke of monarchy in the late 18th century and proclaimed liberty and independence. Nevertheless, by the 1820s France had returned to monarchy, while in the USA the cotton plantations remained dependent on slave labour until the Civil War of the 1860s. And, paradoxically, it was Britain that throughout its global empire abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1834.

Trade & Trading
The opportunity to exploit a visit by one former enemy to another was not lost on the potters of Staffordshire. The scene of General Lafayette landing at New York in 1824 to huge public acclaim was rapidly printed onto the dark ('flown') blue earthenware developed for the American market, and made in vast numbers by James and Ralph Clews of Cobridge, Staffordshire. So lucrative was this export trade that in 1837 James Clews emigrated to America and joined the Indiana Pottery Company for a five-year period.