Object Type
The form and decoration of this teapot seem to be pure invention on the part of the potter. It is difficult to find any influence either from Chinese porcelain or from contemporary silver. It is, however, entirely functional.

Materials & Making
Almost all surviving Staffordshire teapots of the 1720s are red earthenware with white mould-applied 'sprig' decoration of the type traditionally associated with Astbury of Fenton but also made by others. But here the potters have struggled to produce a range of decorative techniques to suit the comparatively new material, white salt-glazed stoneware. The thickness of the body has been reduced both by lathe-turning and by cutting flats around the belly, which offer flat surfaces for the simple mould-applied sprigs. There is abundant evidence of the potter's skill, from the hand-cutting of the body and spout to the elegant sweep of the handle with its fine knife-cut terminal. Before such pieces were mass-produced, potters took a delight in hand-finishing with a sharp knife. Some of the decorative elements, such as the mould-applied sprigs and rouletting (a band of ornament made by pressing a tool similar to a pastry cutter), were refined and developed later for mass-production, but the fashion for cut facets seems to have passed by the 1730s.

On this teapot, the definition of the applied ornament is blurred by a coating of fine white slip containing ground calcined flint (flint that has been baked in a furnace and ground to powder). Shortly afterwards this problem was overcome when the Dorset clay bodies were further refined and whitened.