Object Type
This tureen and cover, in inexpensive earthenware and decorated with an Art Nouveau pattern, made tableware in fashionable styles available to the widest possible market.

Design & Designing
The Art Nouveau pattern, fashionable around 1900, superimposed on this tureen appears somewhat incompatible with the earlier designed shape. Patterning of this type, which was fully developed on the continent by the early 1890s, was rapidly taken up by manufacturers in all materials keen to grasp a commercial opportunity. The highly sophisticated, urban Art Nouveau style was only briefly adopted in Britain. Here, the more countrified and traditional Arts and Crafts style had already taken hold.

Makers
Keeling & Co., which made this tureen, was the last owner of a company which had a very chequered history from 1826 to 1886. The longest continuous period of ownership in the 19th century was under the founding family of Mayer, including the three Mayer brothers who went into partnership in 1836 at Dale Hall Works, Fenton, Staffordshire. They and their successors' production was largely of useful wares in ironstone and earthenware. These wares were often lavishly ornamented with relief modelling, colour printing, painting or gilding. The company's fortunes fluctuated from the mid-1850s onwards. By the mid-1870s, as Bates, Elliott, Walker & Co., it was making jasperware (a fine-grained, hard, slightly translucent stoneware) using 18th-century moulds; terracotta figures; and sanitary, pharmaceutical and garden wares. Keeling & Co. took over in 1886 and continued production until 1936.