Glazed earthenware water-bottle, Bombay School of Art, 19th century

Two-handled water-bottle of reddish earthenware, the surface darkened with manganese over which a design has been painted in white slip under a transparent orange-yellow lead glaze. The globular body on a ring foot is decorated with stylised sprays of flowers within six oval compartments. The long flaring tubular neck rises from a flattened ring at the collar and is decorated with flowering stems divided by and above vertical bands of chevrons. The curving handles project from the lower neck and join the shoulder of the body of the bottle.

Purchased from Lady Ilbert, The Speaker's Court, Palace of Westminster

This bottle , when acquired by the Museum, had a dome-shaped stopper painted with petals. The painted slip decoration is typical of Sindhi ceramics, which influenced the early productions at the Bombay School of Art.

The Bombay School of Art's ceramic productions were traded under the name of Wonderland Art Pottery under the direction of George Wilkins Terry, who had been appointed as its first drawing master in 1857. The pottery flourished from the mid 1870s until about 1890, but limped on after Terry's retirement at that time into the the early years of the 20th century. Early wares were influenced by those manufactured in Sind as Terry set up his workshop with a Sindhi craftsman called Nur Muhammad. Soon, however, much of the decoration came to be influenced by the cave paintings at Ajanta, which had been discovered earlier in the century, and were copied by the School's students over a period lasting from 1872-1885, elements of which were adapted and used to decorate the ceramics in an attempt to encourage traditions of Indian art rather than European ones. Liberty imported some wares to sell in its Regent Street shop in London; see Stronge, Susan,'Wonderland', Ceramics: The International Journal of Ceramics and Glass, London, issue V, August 1987, pp. 48-53.

Bombay School of Art

IM.61-1921