Touching the Past

The excitement is building. The NYCF is almost here. For 5 days (and one glorious evening) the finest ceramics for sale in the world are clustered into one building.  I try to inhale deeply, to absorb everything....but frankly, most of those cups, plates and tureens and other once-useful objects leave me cold. I see their merit (especially when they are pottery rather than porcelain)...but, unlike figures, useful wares just have no soul. Figures, on the other hand, are so human, so engaging, and their mystique permeates the space around them. That is why we collectors, the enlightened few who 'get-it', pay the price for the privilege of sharing our homes with these fragile treasures.

Do you ever think about life in the Staffordshire Potteries between 1780 and 1840, in the decades when these figures were made?  Does it evoke images of, if not quite Downton Abbey, at least a green, idyllic pleasantness?  If so, do you have it wrong!  Think instead of Dante's inferno. Think of houses that were dank, dark hovels, no piped water for anyone, bone-chillingly cold winters, children who toiled from an early age in a working environment that was hazardous to all.....the list can go on and on, but to top it ALL, know that life then happened beneath a dense black pall of smoke that belched day and night from the potters' coal-burning kilns. The smoke routinely transformed day into night. It turned everything and everyone black and made it impossible to see across the road.  The reality is that the worst modern industrial complex in a third-world country is today more pleasant and livable than the Potteries must have been then.  To me, it is amazing that from this hell-hole came the brightly colored, charming, engaging figures we collect. Do they not pay tribute to the triumph of the human spirit???

On this freezingly cold day in North Carolina, I look with awe at this picture of a pair of deer that changed hands recently. Yes, I know real deer are never yellow, but a long-dead painter brightened his gloomy world--and ours--by taking artistic liberty of sorts with this pair of deer. 

These deer were made in the "Sherratt" pot bank. The bocage fronds (each comprises three oak leaves) and flowers are in a typical "Sherratt" combination. As I think we have discussed before, "Sherratt" used bases like this for other animals. The three flowers across the front  in the colors of orange, pink, and blue (the preferred "Sherrratt "house-colors" for painting bocage flowers) are seen routinely on these bases. Such bases are on the "Sherratt" beasties below.

Talking of sheep brings to mind a sheep I have been meaning to show you for a while. At 9.5 inches, this sheep is B-I-G. It is by far the largest sheep I have seen--and I know of only this example. Who made it? I just don't know. I have never seen a base decorated in quite that way either. Perhaps it was made by a small, short-lived pot bank---no surprise that running a business was hard and many pot banks didn't last long.  

At the time this big fella was potted, the Agricultural Revolution was transforming sheep into bigger and bigger animals. A century before, sheep had been scraggly inedible animals valued only for their fleece and perhaps their milk, but by 1820 people were staring in awe at seemingly over-sized sheep that were suited to middle class dinner-tables.  A long-gone potter's amazement is captured in this beautiful figure. 
 
I am not sure how I started writing about deer and ended up with a sheep--but to tie it all together, let me show you what I think is the tallest enamel-painted deer I have recorded. This splendid animal stands 13.5" tall, and, best of all, he has his original antlers and bocage. 

At the time he was made, the sport of deer hunting had been largely eclipsed by fox hunting because chasing fast-footed foxes was so much more fun! Deer had come to be valued as adornments for gentlemen's parks rather than quarry. I first met this particular deer in a private collection in the Cotswolds, but he has since jumped over to this side of the pond and resides in a Texas collection. If only figures could talk, you might say. But look again at your figures carefully . Each in its own way talks. Each is a prism through which we can peer at the past and learn of things that just might not have crossed our minds. As I always say, to hold an early Staffordshire figure is to touch the past.

PS: If you are coming to the NY Ceramics Fair (Jan 21-26), I would like us to meet. If it works for you, please email me.