I am working very hard on preparing material for our book, and things are coming together so nicely. Today, I flipped through the images quickly and went WOW. I have 3,658 captioned to date, with more to come. It takes a village. No, it takes a world to get all this together, and I am so grateful to all of you who have kept the pictures coming. I know from first-hand experience that it is a pain, but I hope you will be thrilled in the end. Meanwhile, I had a tiny revelation this morning as I added a new addition to John Howard's site to my material.
The first pair of cows is new to John's stock. The pair below and the single have fled his coop...or where ever John's cows live. Interesting, is it not, that you could apparently get either cow either with or without a snake? So you could pair these either way. The potters were always happy to please.
These bizarrely painted cows are attributed to what I dub the "Tunstall Group." Excavations on High Street, Tunstall, unearthed some shards that have bocage leaves and flowers just like some that you see above. This has enabled the linking together of a great many figures that were potted by an unknown potbank in Tunstall. The bocage flowers and both forms of bocage fronds that you see above (one pointy, one stubby) match shards. Case closed.
Of course, we do not know the identity of the Tunstall potter. I think there are three candidates. The first is Samuel Grocott, but I dismiss him because his tenure in Tunstall was too brief for him to have turned out the wide range of models that the Tunstall Group produced. Otherwise, it is a toss-up between George Hood and Michael Tunnicliffe.
You will find attribution material laid out in my book, complete with pictures of shards. I am trying to keep it as simple as possible, with more pictures than words. We collectors are a visual bunch. The process of committing my thoughts to paper has been exacting and rewarding. I have learned a lot! And I hope others will carry on the process of scientifically categorizing our figures.
Meanwhile, I have been corresponding with a reporter for The Daily Mail's Weekend Magazine. She is doing a story on the elephant I bought at auction in the UK....but you heard about it first in my blog entry of November 15. The story will run someday, so if you live in the UK and get the Daily Mail, please tell me that they said nice things about the elephant. I was a little amused at the reporter's persistence in knowing how I FELT when I got the elephant. Clearly a generation gap here...
These bizarrely painted cows are attributed to what I dub the "Tunstall Group." Excavations on High Street, Tunstall, unearthed some shards that have bocage leaves and flowers just like some that you see above. This has enabled the linking together of a great many figures that were potted by an unknown potbank in Tunstall. The bocage flowers and both forms of bocage fronds that you see above (one pointy, one stubby) match shards. Case closed.
Of course, we do not know the identity of the Tunstall potter. I think there are three candidates. The first is Samuel Grocott, but I dismiss him because his tenure in Tunstall was too brief for him to have turned out the wide range of models that the Tunstall Group produced. Otherwise, it is a toss-up between George Hood and Michael Tunnicliffe.
You will find attribution material laid out in my book, complete with pictures of shards. I am trying to keep it as simple as possible, with more pictures than words. We collectors are a visual bunch. The process of committing my thoughts to paper has been exacting and rewarding. I have learned a lot! And I hope others will carry on the process of scientifically categorizing our figures.
Meanwhile, I have been corresponding with a reporter for The Daily Mail's Weekend Magazine. She is doing a story on the elephant I bought at auction in the UK....but you heard about it first in my blog entry of November 15. The story will run someday, so if you live in the UK and get the Daily Mail, please tell me that they said nice things about the elephant. I was a little amused at the reporter's persistence in knowing how I FELT when I got the elephant. Clearly a generation gap here...
