On View
Not on viewPitchers
Date1840-1850
Terms
- Pitchers
- Ceramic
- Staffordshire
Dimensions14.59 × 6.98 cm (5 3/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
Credit LineBequest of Mrs. Adams Tolman (1941)
Object numberTH90
DescriptionGlazed earthenware with pink luster, mottled. Decorated across middle with an inch and one quarter band of copper colored "sand." Lined inside with a deep band of the mottled pink lustre. The handle has been mended on the side.
The two pitchers in the collection (Th90 and Th91) are not part of a dinner or tea service but are English, the product of one of the numerous potteries in Staffordshire. They are a type of ware that has come to be known as pink luster. The vivid color is produced by gold added to the glaze; when the pieces are fired in a reduction atmosphere (an atmosphere in which very little oxygen is available), the gold turns pink. The reduction atmosphere also creates the surface iridescence characteristic of this glaze. These pitchers combine a number of decorative applied in an almost haphazard way to the already-complicated forms of the pitchers.
Only ten pieces of tableware survive from the much more extensive collection of plates, bowls, glasses, and flatware that Cynthia Thoreau would have used to furnish her table. The Thoreau household generally had one or more boarders in addition to the family of six. Prudence Ward and her daughter were boarders with the Thoreaus; Cynthia Thoreau's sister Louisa lived with them for more than thirty years. Some of John and Henry's students boarded when their school was in operation, and there were other short-term boarders as well. Dinners for ten or more must have been a regular occurrence.
Around the middle of the 19th century English potteries produced dinner services of transfer-printed earthenware in great quantity and regained a good part of the American market for common tablewares that they had lost to Chinese export ware around the time of the War of 1812. The Thoreaus may have had an English dinner or tea service as many of their neighbors did, but no pieces survive.
The two pitchers in the collection (Th90 and Th91) are not part of a dinner or tea service but are English, the product of one of the numerous potteries in Staffordshire. They are a type of ware that has come to be known as pink luster. The vivid color is produced by gold added to the glaze; when the pieces are fired in a reduction atmosphere (an atmosphere in which very little oxygen is available), the gold turns pink. The reduction atmosphere also creates the surface iridescence characteristic of this glaze. These pitchers combine a number of decorative applied in an almost haphazard way to the already-complicated forms of the pitchers.
Only ten pieces of tableware survive from the much more extensive collection of plates, bowls, glasses, and flatware that Cynthia Thoreau would have used to furnish her table. The Thoreau household generally had one or more boarders in addition to the family of six. Prudence Ward and her daughter were boarders with the Thoreaus; Cynthia Thoreau's sister Louisa lived with them for more than thirty years. Some of John and Henry's students boarded when their school was in operation, and there were other short-term boarders as well. Dinners for ten or more must have been a regular occurrence.
Around the middle of the 19th century English potteries produced dinner services of transfer-printed earthenware in great quantity and regained a good part of the American market for common tablewares that they had lost to Chinese export ware around the time of the War of 1812. The Thoreaus may have had an English dinner or tea service as many of their neighbors did, but no pieces survive.
Collections
- Henry David Thoreau Collection
