Soup Plate, "Pine Orchard House, Catskill Mountains"
Brooklyn Museum photograph
Object Label
These ceramics are decorated with American landscape scenes and were made in England for the American market. Before the 1840s, only the elite could afford dinnerware, then made of expensive porcelain. One of the early fruits of the Industrial Revolution was the production of inexpensive machine-molded and mechanically decorated earthenware for the middle class. These objects were decorated by the transfer technique, in which the scene is engraved on a metal plate, inked, printed on paper, and then pressed, or transferred, onto the ceramic body.
Caption
Enoch Wood & Sons active 1818–1846. Soup Plate, "Pine Orchard House, Catskill Mountains", ca. 1835. Earthenware, blue underglaze, 10 1/4 x 10 1/4 in. (26 x 26 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. William C. Esty, 60.213.186. Creative Commons-BY (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 60.213.186_bw.jpg)
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Maker
Title
Soup Plate, "Pine Orchard House, Catskill Mountains"
Date
ca. 1835
Geography
Place manufactured: Stoke-on-Trent, Burslem, Staffordshire, England
Medium
Earthenware, blue underglaze
Classification
Dimensions
10 1/4 x 10 1/4 in. (26 x 26 cm)
Signatures
no signature
Inscriptions
no inscriptions
Markings
On bottom of plate: impressed "E. Wood and Son Burslem, Warranted" around an eagle with "Semi-China" above. Also, blue-printed eagle with scroll in mouth reading "E Pluribus Unum"; shield at eagle's feet with clouds and "Pine Orchard House, Catskill Mountains"
Credit Line
Gift of Mrs. William C. Esty
Accession Number
60.213.186
Rights
Creative Commons-BY
You may download and use Brooklyn Museum images of this three-dimensional work in accordance with a Creative Commons license. Fair use, as understood under the United States Copyright Act, may also apply. Please include caption information from this page and credit the Brooklyn Museum. If you need a high resolution file, please fill out our online application form (charges apply). For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
Frequent Art Questions
What is the technique used to make these?
These are what is called transferware. Rather than being hand painted, which was traditionally very expensive and labor-intensive work, these designs were transferred from metal plates, a process derived from printed book illustrations. In fact, many of the decorations would be copied from images in published books.
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