Flat-back spill vase featuring Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868) as Mazeppa. Glazed earthenware, Staffordshire, ca.1870. Antony Hippisley Coxe Collection

Cream glazed earthenware flat-back spill vase modelled as a horse, with Mazeppa strapped to its back, cantering from left to right. The vase is decorated with flowers and foliage and Mazeppa wears a royal blue tunic, off the shoulder. The base is decorated in green to represent grass with modelled clumps of foliage added. Hounds are at the feet of the horse, running in the same direction.

Antony Hippisley Coxe Collection

Mazeppa began its career as an epic poem by Byron in 1818, the story of a page caught in an affair with a married woman from a higher class. When the affair is discovered, the outraged husband has the young man tied to the back of a wild horse which is set loose, the intent being to kill him. He survives, of course, and the story inspired Romantic artists and performers, the most notable being the American Adah Isaacs Menken.

Born in New Orleans in 1835 and dead by 1868, Menken managed to scandalize America with her Lady Godiva-like stage performances in Mazeppa, her multiple marriages (four in seven years), her short cropped hair and her cigarettes. She converted to Judaism with her short-lived first marriage and remained committed to the faith throughout her life.

In the 1860s she took Mazeppa to Paris and London (and was there feted by Dumas pére, Rossetti, Swinburne, Dickens and others). She died unnoticed in Paris at the age of 33 and was buried in a cemetery in Montparnasse. It has been said that Mazeppa remained the most widely performed drama in the American West from the 1860s until the end of the century.

Byron's poem had captured the imagination of French painters: Gericault in 1823 and Delacroix in 1824, both of whom presumably identified with Mazeppa, and, perhaps most famously, Emile Jean Horace Vernet, who all painted images of the hapless Mazeppa tied to the horse.

Earthenware flatbacks and figurines for mantelpiece decoration were first produced in Staffordshire in the late 1830s. The earliest datable figures appear to be ones of Queen Victoria. Production of earthenware figures continued throughout Victoria's lifetime, but although they were still made after her death in 1901, few appear to have been produced after 1905. During their heyday, however, they were produced in vast numbers, usually modelled after prints. Since they were produced in moulds, they were relatively cheap and easy to make. They represented a wide variety of subjects but those of actors and actresses were especially popular.

Mazeppa was an spectular drama, based on a poem by Lord Byron. The play acquired some notoriety when American actress and equestrienne, Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868) appeared as the Tartar prince, Mazeppa, at Astley's Amphitheatre in 1864. Tied to the back of a galloping horse, and dressed in a brief tunic and flesh-coloured body tights, Menken was a sensation. The ceramic figure represents her in a blue tunic but Menken's stage costume was intended to suggest nudity, and her apparently nakedness made the play both a shock and a great success.

S.125-2007