ENGLISH & EUROPEAN CERAMICS & GLASS

21st April 2020

Now accepting consignments for the 13th October English & European Ceramics & Glass sale.

2. A Bovey Tracey creamware jug, 19th century, 15cm high. Provenance: a private collection in the West Country. Estimate: £600 – 800

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4. A large and extremely rare Bow model of a lioness, c.1750-52, 23cm long. Estimate: £15,000 – 20,000

What do a Devonshire farmer, a Lancastrian inn-keeper and a Norfolk ship-owner have in common?

These three disparate professions from three corners of England have all united as part of a private pottery collection from the West Country, which contains several dated and documentary objects. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the trade and merchant classes, with enough money to do so, would commission personalised ceramics to commemorate an event or sometimes just to confer status.

This delftware ship plate (opposite) is one of several recorded survivals (including one in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge) that were made to commemorate the launching of the John and Mary, a ship built in Yarmouth in 1756 and owned by John Spencer. The ship is recorded on the 1764 Lloyd’s Register as voyaging from Yarmouth to Leghorn (Livorna) with a crew of eight men. This particular plate had remained with the Spencer family until 1997 when it was sold at Phillips in Bury St Edmunds. More is known of the William Ellis recorded on the creamware jug (fig. 2), made at Bovey Tracey, just ten miles south of the village of Chagford on Dartmoor. Ellis was a farmer of increasing acreage (according to census returns of the time), whose son and grandson went on to farm the same land throughout the reign of Queen Victoria. It is possible that Ellis was related to another William Ellis who took over the running of the Indeo Pottery at Bovey in 1776, and whose descendants remained working at the potworks well into the 19th century.

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Also one of several recorded examples is this rather smaller plate inscribed for the ‘Old Boy’ at Gasting (fig. 3). There being no such place, it has long been assumed that the reference is to Garstang in Lancashire, a market town midway between Preston and Morecambe and an important staging post during the 18th century. Its position on the London to Edinburgh route meant that the town had more than its fair share of inns and taverns, and the Old Boy is believed to have been one such, although sadly no record of it seems to remain today. Thomas Knowles, a traditional Lancastrian name, is likely to have been the proprietor. QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE This remarkable Bow porcelain model of a lioness is a surprising 23cm in length and one of just a few survivals of animal figures of this large size. She is in near perfect condition and dates to the early years of the factory’s output, having been made around 1750. An undecorated model (together with its pair figure of a lion) is recorded in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, and another poorly fired example is on display at the Seattle Art Museum.