Flower container (Wall pocket)

Description

Flower containers such as this one were made in England in a broad range of materials and decorative types and are known by several terms, such as wall pocket, wall vase, flower horn, cornucopia, flower faces, and others. This example, one of a pair, features relief neoclassical motifs, including a stylized dolphin’s head (top) and grinning satyr’s mask (bottom). Variations on this model were made in Staffordshire in salt-glazed stoneware and, as shown here, in cream-colored earthenware (creamware). A salt-glazed stoneware block mold for this form of wall pocket survives in the Potteries Museum collection in Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire, and an apparently unique English delftware (tin-glazed earthenware) wall pocket of this form is inscribed on the back "PM/1769." The brown blotchy appearance was created by sponging on slip (liquid clay) with metallic oxides such as iron. Such designs imitated elegant tortoiseshell that by the mid 1700s had long been popular as applications onto boxes, mirror frames and the like. Much less costly, though still fashionable, were similarly patterned ceramics. For a salt-glazed white stoneware wall pocket in a very similar pattern, see 1976.0025. Among early references to this general type of earthenware in America is a 11th March 1751 Boston Evening Post ad by merchant Henry Barnes, who offered for sale “Cream coloured and Tortoiseshell Tea Pots, Sugar Dishes.” Other early American documents include the same term as well as “tortoise” or “turtle shell.”