page_title: Tin-glazed pottery
section_title: English delftware
hierarchical_section_title: Tin-glazed pottery / English delftware
caption_attribution_description: English: Exhibit in the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. This artwork is old enough so that it is in the public domain. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction.
context_page_description: Tin-glazed pottery is earthenware covered in lead glaze with added tin oxide which is white, shiny and opaque; usually this provides a background for brightly painted decoration. It has been important in Islamic and European pottery, but very little used in East Asia. The pottery body is usually made of red or buff-colored earthenware and the white glaze imitated Chinese porcelain. The decoration on tin-glazed pottery is usually applied to the unfired glaze surface by brush with metallic oxides, commonly cobalt oxide, copper oxide, iron oxide, manganese dioxide and antimony oxide. The makers of Italian tin-glazed pottery from the late Renaissance blended oxides to produce detailed and realistic polychrome paintings.
  The earliest tin-glazed pottery appears to have been made in Iraq in the 9th century, the oldest fragments having been excavated during the First World War from the palace of Samarra about fifty miles north of Baghdad. From there it spread to Egypt, Persia and Spain before reaching Italy in mid-15th century, early Renaissance, Holland in the 16th century and England, France and other European countries shortly after.
context_section_description: English delftware was made in the British Isles between about 1550 and the late 18th century.  The main centers of production were London, Bristol and Liverpool with smaller centers at Wincanton, Glasgow and Dublin.
  John Stow's Survey of London (1598) records the arrival in 1567 of two Antwerp potters, Jasper Andries and Jacob Jansen, in Norwich, where they made "Gally Paving Tiles, and vessels for Apothecaries and others, very artificially". In 1579 Jansen applied to Queen Elizabeth I for the sole right to practice "galleypotting" (at the time "galliware" was the term in English for delftware) in London and soon set up a workshop at Aldgate to the east of the city.  There were already other Flemish potters in London, two of them in Southwark recorded in 1571 as "painters of pottes".
  English delftware pottery and its painted decoration is similar in many respects to that from Holland, but its peculiarly English quality has been commented upon: "... there is a relaxed tone and a sprightliness which is preserved throughout the history of English delftware; the overriding mood is provincial and naive rather than urbane and sophisticated." Its methods and techniques were less sophisticated than those of its continental counterparts.
  The earliest known piece with an English inscription is a dish dated 1600 in the London Museum. It is painted in blue, purple, green, orange and yellow and depicts the Tower of London and Old London Bridge, surrounded by the words, "THE ROSE IS RED THE LEAVES ARE GRENE GOD SAVE ELIZABETH OUR QUEENE" and an Italianate border of masks and leaves. The rim is decorated with dashes of blue and can be considered the first in series of large decorated dishes so painted and called blue-dash chargers. Blue-dash chargers, usually between about 25 and 35 cm in diameter with abstract, floral, religious, patriotic or topographical motifs, were produced in quantity by London and Bristol potters until the early 18th century.  As they were kept for decoration on walls, dressers and side-tables, many have survived and they are well represented in museum collections.
  Smaller and more everyday wares were also made: paving tiles, mugs, drug jars, dishes, wine bottles, posset pots, salt pots, candlesticks, fuddling cups, puzzle jugs, barber's bowls, pill slabs, bleeding bowls, porringers, and flower bricks.
  Towards the end of the 17th century, changing taste led to the replacement of apothecary pots, paving tiles and large dishes by polite tablewares, delicate ornaments, punch bowls, teapots, cocoa pots and coffee-pots.
  There are good examples of English delftware in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum.
caption: Charger, English delftware, 1730-1740, the decoration here an early and charmingly naive attempt at chinoiserie
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