With the publication of the 2021 volume of Ceramics in America, readers will have the ability to continue trekking through time and space from the comfort of their own home, oYce, coVee shop, or wherever it is they choose to read the journal. Fitting indeed, in this age of the COVID-19 pandemic where many of our travels are now “virtual journeys,” a theme shared by this year’s articles. British- and Chinese-made tablewares decorated with both painted and printed scenes, for example, were passports to foreign countries, historical events, political intrigue, social conditions, technological achievements, and vignettes of everyday life.
One of the lessons that archaeology repeatedly teaches us is that the smallest ceramic fragment can provide the most astonishing historical connection to times and places that might otherwise have gone overlooked. A narrative of such a link is presented by frequent contributor Bly Straube in her article “Jingdezhen, China . . . Bantam, Java . . . Jamestown, Virginia: Degrees of Separation for a Porcelain Bowl.” Fragments from an early-seventeenth-century blue-and-white “dragon” Chinese porcelain bowl found at Jamestown were previously reviewed in Bly’s 2017 article “Jamestown, Virginia: Virginia Company Period,” in which she declared it her all-time personal favorite archaeologically retrieved ceramic artifact. Since that publication, a nearly identical example with the same exuberantly executed dragon decoration was discovered in Bantam, Java, to permit making mind-blowing connections to several seventeenth-century Jamestown individuals, literally a world away. Without spoiling her story here, let it suffice to say that Bly’s article is among the most exciting research we have printed during the twenty years of Ceramics in America publication.
Another remarkable early-seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain object from Jamestown’s rich ceramics assemblage is the topic of curator Merry Outlaw’s “Fit for a Queen: A Chinese Porcelain Bottle Found at Jamestown, Virginia.” She tells of the identification of celadon-glazed Chinese porcelain fragments decorated in bright red and green motifs, illustrating similarly decorated intact bottles from the British royal collection. At the time, such items were exotic, expensive, and available only to elite English consumers—which begs the question of how such fragments ended up in Jamestown’s archaeological context. To answer the question, Merry suggests that it was trade associations between high-ranking individuals who had investments in international trade, the East India Company, and the Virginia Company that brought such exotic objects to Jamestown.
The impact that Chinese-made porcelains had on Western civilizations cannot be overstated. No other ceramic export in the world has ever achieved such prominence. The word china has become part of our vocabulary as synonymous with Chinese porcelain. In federal America, blue-and-white porcelain decorated in the so-called Canton pattern was used by virtually all moderate- to upper-class households. In their article “From China to Virginia: A Dish with a View of the Dutch Folly Fort in Guangzhou,” Matthew Reeves and Ron Fuchs discuss excavated examples from a set of porcelain dishes from Montpelier, the Virginia home of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, and his wife, Dolley Payne Todd Madison. The service was decorated with a scene of the Dutch Folly Fort, one of the many landmarks in the city of Guangzhou, known to Europeans and Americans as Canton, China’s largest international port in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The authors trace the history of the service from its probable acquisition at the time of the Madisons’ marriage in 1793 to discards recycled by Montpelier’s enslaved population. They further suggest that the porcelain service may have been in residence during the Madisons’ tenure in Washington, D.C., beginning in 1808, but ultimately was destroyed or lost when the British burned the White House on August 24, 1814.
One of the original objectives of Ceramics in America was to provide a first-person voice to those most intimately entrenched on the front line of ceramics connoisseurship—the private collector. For this volume, we are thrilled to present “Art and Ancestry: The Bruce Coleman Perkins Collection of Chinese Armorial Porcelain.” Like most collectors, Bruce’s collecting bug was instilled in childhood, fostered by knowledgeable parents and the American art and antiques in his home. In the pursuit of a career in the antiques field, Bruce subsequently was introduced to many aspects of collecting but developed a particular passion for Chinese export porcelain, especially those decorated with coats of arms. In his highly personal narrative, Bruce tells us of his introduction to these export wares, and his “road to Damascus” moment during a symposium at Washington and Lee University that launched his journey. Not only are we treated to Gavin Ashworth’s beautiful photography of a sampling of Bruce’s very special collection, we hear what many other collectors say again and again—that, in the long run, it’s not so much the objects that matter but the adventure, knowledge, and collegiality shared by like-minded collectors. I am grateful to my co-editor, Ron Fuchs, whose long-standing friendship with the author helped bring this article to fruition.
Ceramics-based friendships often result in productive collaborations, especially in furthering new discoveries. I vividly remember opening an image on my computer sent by my archaeologist friend, Dan Mouer, many years ago. Dan and his colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University had just recovered fragments from two eighteenth-century transfer-printed creamware plates found in an urban excavation in Richmond, Virginia. They sought my help in identifying the depicted scene, which tantalizingly contained the partial word “Phila.” (for Philadelphia). At the time I was an assistant ceramics curator at Colonial Williamsburg, and through its resources I was able to identify the printed scene as one the earliest American subjects to appear on English creamware—“A Picturesque View of the State of the Nation for February 1778.” It was odd, however, that this widely distributed political cartoon, made popular during the political and economic events leading up to the American Revolution, was found in an archaeological context in Richmond. In “English Creamware in Revolutionary-Era America,” Dan makes the case that the Richmond plates were once owned by patriotic supporters of the American cause and the new nation. Philadelphia curator and archaeologist Debbie Miller contributes to the article with another excavated plate that has the same print and was recovered in Philadelphia. Because it was found in a tenant’s house privy, it is uncertain who owned the plate, but Debbie suggests they likely were American patriots who lived through the British occupation of Philadelphia during the Revolution.
The expressions of patriotic sentiment on ceramics has a long history that stretches back into antiquity on the ancient pots of the Greeks. For eighteenth-century Americans, transfer-printed images commemorating George Washington’s life and death found their way onto earthenware jugs, pitchers, and other dishes more than any other political figure. Mount Vernon curator Adam Erby presents the previously untold history of a source image used by Liverpool’s Herculaneum Pottery, found on multiple creamware jugs that exist today in American museums and private collections. In his article “ ‘He in Glory, America in Tears’: Jacob Perkins, Washington Funeral Medal, and Liverpool Jugs,” Adam tells the story of how Newburyport ship captain and merchant Edmund Swett asked Liverpool potters to copy the design from a gold memorial medal made for Washington’s death in 1799. The resourceful Liverpool potters not only filled an order of commemorative jugs for Swett’s use in Newburyport, they apparently continued to use the image on other pitchers for the larger American market.
British ceramics factories have long relied on printed images as sources for creating and marketing their designs. In “The Thames Tunnel Inkwell,” English ceramic collector John Ault has written about a unique salt-glazed stoneware inkwell in his collection that was made to commemorate the opening of London’s Thames Tunnel in 1843. At the time of its construction, the tunnel was known as the eighth wonder of the world. Running deep underneath the Thames riverbed, connecting Rotherhithe and Wapping, it was built by the celebrated civil engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father, Marc. While the tunnel’s history may be unfamiliar to most of us, a souvenir stoneware inkwell illustrating the tunnel’s excavators at work in their “cells” survives to remind us of its importance. The international significance of the project is underscored by an entry Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, made in her travel diary during a visit to London in 1838:
Notwithstanding the easiness of the way there was something trying to the nerves in the descent to what appeared the bowels of the earth, and it was with a feeling of awe if not of alarm that I slowly wound my way into the depth of this subterranean tower, which seemed a fit entrance to the lower regions, to the palace of Pluto or the abode of Hela; and indeed, when having passed the last short reach of the staircase, the long vista of the Tunnel, with its double arches lighted with gas, came suddenly into view, the eVect was altogether grand and imposing.[1]
Another technological achievement documented by a ceramic vessel is oVered by author Sam Margolin in “Tribute to an Unsung Hero.” A small white pitcher made by the Ball Brothers of Sunderland, England, helps us remember the invention of the lifeboat, a specialized maritime vessel most readers now take for granted. Sam’s essay traces its history to a specific event on March 15, 1789, when a merchant ship foundered at the mouth of the River Tyne in South Shields, County Durham, England. The tragic event was witnessed by a horrified and helpless crowd, standing on shore as the entire ship’s crew drowned. Public outcry resulted in a competition to design a lifeboat “calculated to brave dangers of the sea.” As recorded on the Sunderland jug, a William Wouldhave was declared the winner in 1789, although Sam’s research reveals that the incident is still mired in controversy over who actually deserved the credit.
In 1950, the preeminent American ceramics historian Lura Woodside Watkins published Early New England Potters and Their Wares. In discussing the eighteenth-century ceramics history of Hartford, Connecticut, Watkins wrote that “the first potter whom I can place by actual date in the city, is Ashbel Wells,” where he is listed as “a trader dealing in stoneware from 1785 to 1794.” In the seventy years since her publication, not a single object bearing Wells’s name or even attributed to his manufactory has been forthcoming. That changed recently when a social media posting included photographs of a one-gallon stoneware jar impressed “A:WELLS” that had been hiding in a private New England collection. In “The Eighteenth-Century Stoneware of Ashbel Wells Jr. of Hartford, Connecticut, Revealed,” I examine Wells’s business career as a merchant, store owner, and the owner of a stoneware manufactory between 1783 and 1794. Pending future findings, the “A:WELLS” jar remains the earliest known New England stoneware vessel with a maker’s name stamped on it.
In the 2019 volume of Ceramics in America, author Lorraine German discussed William Little, a wealthy Boston merchant who was the pivotal force behind the success of the potters Jonathan Fenton and Frederick Carpenter at their Lynn Street pottery in Boston between 1793 and 1798. Financial setbacks forced Little to close the pottery in 1798, whereupon the head workman, Frederick Carpenter, returned to employment in the potteries of New Haven, Connecticut. (Fenton had departed a year earlier.) Lorraine now continues the story with her article “The Little Pottery of Charlestown, Massachusetts.” Seeking to continue in the pottery business, William Little’s brother John bought property in Charleston, across the Charles River from Boston. Carpenter is enticed back to continue making his well-known ocher-dipped English-style stoneware. Lorraine illustrates a number of signature jars and jugs made during Carpenter’s tenure in the Charlestown pottery. The saga takes a further twist when Carpenter leaves the Little brothers’ pottery around 1810 to work for a nearby competitor, the Charlestown pottery established by Barnabas Edmands and William Burroughs, where he worked perhaps until his death in 1827. A future article will discuss examples of Carpenter’s stoneware attributed to this final phase of his production.
Despite the wealth of online resources aVorded the modern antiques collector, for the most part we still rely on the traditional hunting grounds of the trade—flea markets and estate sales. Nearly twenty years ago, I undertook salvage archaeology of the site of the Richmond Stoneware Manufactory of Benjamin DuVal in Richmond, Virginia. Thousands of the stoneware fragments were recovered from the factory site, which had operated between 1811 and roughly 1820. Among them, two deeply incised fragments with floral/leaf designs highlighted with cobalt had stuck in my mind. I had given up on ever seeing an intact parallel with this elaborate incised decoration surface in the antiques market—that is, until I received photographs of a beautifully decorated ovoid-shaped jug found in a flea market in Atlanta. In “Newly Discovered Examples from DuVal’s Richmond Stoneware Manufactory,” I consider this jug along with another, marked DuVal example recently found in an Charlottesville estate sale that further adds to our knowledge about early Richmond stoneware products.
Salt-glazed stoneware is featured as well in Sylvia Lovegren-Petras’s much-needed article “The Invisible American Potter: Justus Morton of Brantford, Ontario.” An extremely active and prolific potter, Morton, who was born in Massachusetts, is best known for starting the successful Brantford Pottery Works in 1849 in what is now Ontario, Canada. Much of what has been written about his stoneware covers his time working in Canada. For a period of twenty-five years before that however, Morton lived and worked in various American potteries. Sylvia’s research corrects Morton’s potting history, which begins with his early training in about 1817 in Massachusetts, and follows a circuitous path through various stints in New York, Vermont, and Maryland. His story reads like an historical travelogue during a formative time of America’s industrial history, leaving behind marked examples of his stoneware, like so many breadcrumbs, for Sylvia to follow. Thanks to Sylvia’s eVorts, Morton’s American history as a stoneware potter is now secure.
There is an axiom in archaeology that excavation without publication is as if nothing had happened. Of course, there are many reasons that archaeological assemblages never receive the benefit of publication—usually lack of time, money, or expertise. Unfortunately, the untimely death of an investigator is sometimes the reason. In “Coincidental Attribution,” Jonathan Rickard records for posterity a group of archaeologically recovered earthenwares from a waster pit in StaVordshire collected by the late Don Carpentier. The fragments have been attributed to the factory partnership of Enoch Wood and James Caldwell, which operated under the name Wood & Caldwell between 1790 and 1818. Jonathan matches a sample of the fragments to intact antique examples from his encyclopedic collection of mocha and “dipped Wares.” Both Jonathan and Don have long been in the forefront of scholarship related to the history of these wares, and we are fortunate to have this material published for the first time in this journal and to further celebrate this important facet of Don’s lifetime career of decorative arts research.
The final article for the 2021 journal is a profile of ceramic artist David Stuempfle, whose workshop and kiln is located in the North Carolina potting community of Seagrove. David is recognized internationally as one of the masters of ash-glaze wood-firing technologies used in several places around the world. With a career spanning forty years, David remains an energetic advocate for the craft tradition and his work has been featured in numerous articles and books. In “A Study in Rhythm: The Stoneware of David Stuempfle” I share some of the time I spent with David over the years, learning from his pots, our conversations, and watching amazing firings of his massive kiln. We have the chance to hear David’s own thoughts as he writes about five nineteenth-century American stoneware masters that have influenced his own work: Frederick Carpenter, Thomas Chandler, David Drake, Daniel Seagle, and Chester Webster. Those names will be familiar to students of American ceramic history, and we are privileged to have a working potter link these historical icons from the perspective of “someone involved in materials and the making process.”
For the 2022 volume of the Ceramics in America, the planned lineup will include some spectacular information about eighteenth-century Philadelphia-made slipware, much of it published for the first time. In addition, we will have fresh insights on ceramics from David Drake, George Ohr, and the little-known nineteenth-century Virginia potter John Wesley Carpenter. New thoughts on ceramics made for the abolition movement will be featured. Among the recent discoveries will be articles on eighteenth-century English delft found in Virginia, the startling ceramic contents of three eighteenth-century Philadelphia privies, ceramics from a Harriet Tubman homesite, and a southern stoneware ring bottle belonging to a nineteenth-century root doctor in Columbia, South Carolina.
1. MS (MHi: Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Diary, Ms N-1027), in Coolidge’s hand. Published in Thomas JeVerson’s Granddaughter in Queen Victoria’s England: The Travel Diary of Ellen Wayles Coolidge, 1838–1839, edited by Ann Lucas Birle and Lisa A. Francavilla (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2011), pp. 57–61. https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/2000.
MS (MHi: Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Diary, Ms N-1027), in Coolidge’s hand. Published in Thomas JeVerson’s Granddaughter in Queen Victoria’s England: The Travel Diary of Ellen Wayles Coolidge, 1838–1839, edited by Ann Lucas Birle and Lisa A. Francavilla (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2011), pp. 57–61. https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/2000.