Saucer

Description

This object fits into a large group of salt-glazed white stoneware created in Staffordshire, England, during the mid 1700s. Commonly in coffee- and teaware forms, such ceramics were created by slip-casting into molds that allowed for wonderful, typically vertically-oriented panels filled with allegorical themes in relief. Although numerous factories created such objects, the design themes often were repeated, though not necessarily in the same order. On such ceramics, simplified imagery often is drawn from Aesop’s Fables (such as a scene from “The Fox and the Crane [or Stork]”), biblical references (such as to Samson), and traditional English tales (“Darby and Joan”). Symbolic imagery is exemplified by two-headed eagles (representing the Holy Roman or Prussian empires). A reclining nude “virgin” near a unicorn is a medieval and later reference to innocence. Cupid astride a lion represents Love taming the Savage Beast. Based on archaeological evidence, English wares of this type made their way across the Atlantic to colonial America. A so-ornamented fragmentary coffee or chocolate cup was excavated at Mount Vernon and probably was owned by George Washington’s half-brother Lawrence, before George took over the property. Other archaeological evidence was unearthed at the Anderson site in Williamsburg, Virginia and at Fort Frederick in Maine. For Winterthur salt-glazed stoneware beverage-related forms featuring many of the same allegorical motifs in relief, see 1958.0873-1958.0885, 1970.0424, 1992.0120, and 2024.0014.060.