Dipped Earthenware

Defining Attributes

Dipped refined earthenware is defined by its brightly colored and often exuberant surface decoration. These surface decorations were created using clays that had different colors when fired or that were dyed by the addition of mineral oxides suspended in a liquid solution known as slip. Slip could be used as a dip for the entire surface of the vessel or as a substance with which to pour, band, drip or trail designs. Other designs were created by removing slip in a variety of cut designs to expose the ceramic body underneath. Dipped wares were the cheapest hollowware with color decoration available to consumers from the 1780s through the nineteenth century (Miller 1991). In inventories of the 1820s and 1830s, dipped earthenwares were sometimes referred to as “Fancy ceramics” (Priddy 2004:170), although the most common potters’ term for these wares was “dipped” or “dip’t”. In intervening years, collectors, curators and archaeologists have used a number of other terms to identify these wares, including annular, mocha, and banded. Table 1 provides a list of contemporary potters’ and merchants’ terms for the wares, as well as collectors’ terms that have been added over the intervening years and terms that are misleading.

Chronology

Dipped earthenwares were produced between the 1770s and the end of the nineteenth century (Rickard 2006, Carpentier and Rickard 2001). Since these wares almost never have maker’s marks, they are difficult to date accurately. Beginning production dates for certain types of decorations have usually been determined from patents for tools used in producing the designs or descriptions in dated potter’s records (Table 2). They can also be dated to some extent by vessel shape, such as the London/Grecian and double-curve shapes.

Slip marbled creamwares [variegated], manufactured in the 1770s, are the earliest known examples of slip on refined earthenware (Rickard 2006:4). This type of decoration was also used on the earlier Staffordshire slipwares and sometimes the surface was combed in addition to being variegated. The earliest dipped wares, which to some extent replaced the agate wares popular in the mid-eighteenth century, sought to imitate geological stones like agate and marble. Later wares were comprised of more fanciful and abstract designs. Increased simplicity and uniformity of decoration (i.e. simple banding without additional slip or incised designs) marked later dipped wares, after circa 1840. This simplification was a way of cutting the production cost as dipped wares fell from 1.6 times the cost of plain creamware in 1799 down to 1.08 times the cost of plain creamware by the 1870s (Miller 1991:22).

This essay will use categories for industrial or factory-made dipped earthenwares as defined by Jonathan Rickard in Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770-1939 (University Press of New England, 2006). Excellent descriptions and illustrations of the various techniques used to produce dipped earthenwares can also be found in Lynne Sussman’s Mocha, Banded, Cat’s Eye, and Other Factory-Made Slipware (1997) and in Donald Carpentier and Jonathan Rickard’ s “Slip Decoration in the Age of Industrialization” (2001). Don Carpentier and Jonathan Rickard have produced an excellent video showing the various ways that dipped wares were produced (Treat American Craftsmen: Secrets of Traditional Crafts. Mochaware. East Field Village, East Nassau, New York).

Solid Color Slip Fields and Banded Wares
In the simplest form of dipped decoration, colored slip was applied to green ware to form a solid color field. Slip could be applied by a blowing bottle and also may have been brushed on while the vessels were on a lathe. Trimming with a lathe defined the slip edges. (Figure 1) Banding, the application of bands of colored slip to a vessel, was a long-lived decorative technique in dipped earthenwares. Bands of slip were added to the ceramics by trailing them with a slip bottle onto a vessel mounted horizontally on a turning lathe. These wares are sometimes referred to as “annular wares”, a collector’s term not found in contemporary documents. Both of these decorative techniques are almost always used in conjunction with another form of decoration typical of dipped wares (such as rouletting, engine turning, mocha or slip trailing). Click here to view images.

Over time, color choices of the potters changed from brighter, earthy tones of the late 18th and early 19th centuries to duller colors like blues and greys (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:132) . Grey, blue and black bands are colors more typical of dipped wares produced in the 1850s (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:128).

Variegated Surfaces
Some of the earliest dipped wares displayed variegated surfaces emulating agate, porphyry and other stone, created when different color slips were allowed to run and swirl against one another. Sometimes these swirled slips were further mixed by combing. Click here to view images.

The earliest slip colors used on variegated wares were brown, caramel, rust and blue (rarely) against a cream colored body (Rickard 2006:21). These marbleized surfaces appear on late eighteenth-century creamwares, rarely on pearlwares, and were often used in combination with sprig molding. Early nineteenth-century marbled wares included orange and blue applied in patterns more abstract than geological (Rickard 2006:25). A variant on marbled slip variegated surfaces was produced using small dried pieces of clay in several colors. The clay bits were pressed into a solid color slip field, producing encrusted wares. Sometimes a lathe was used to smooth the vessel surface. This technique produced a finely-grained granite-like design called surface agate. Rickard believes that the demand for variegated wares showed a significant decline in the first decade of the nineteenth century (2006:24).

Engine Turned Dipped Wares
Engine turning lathes allowed potters to decorate the surfaces of ceramic vessels with complex, geometric designs including chevrons, checks, dots, fluting, interrupted lines and zigzags that cut through the slip to create these designs. Combining these cut designs with colored slips produced striking patterns on dipped vessels. After a leather-hard, unfired vessel was covered or banded with one or more colors of slipped clay, fixed blades and cams were used to cut designs into the ceramic, revealing the lighter colored clay body underneath. Alternately, a vessel could be trailed with a slip (usually dark brown) after an engine turned or rouletted pattern was added. Using a lathe a second time to shave away the colored slip from the vessel surface left the darker colored slip in the recessed areas. This technique is also known as inlaid slip. Rouletted patterns, often employed around vessel rims, are one of the most common inlaid motifs (Sussman 1997:34). Click here to view images.

Engine turning lathes are believed to have been in use in ceramic production as early as the 1770s (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:116). Engine turned dipped earthenwares continued in production into the late nineteenth century (Rickard 2006:39).

Mocha Decoration
While the term “mocha” has become synonymous with dipped earthenwares in recent years, this term should only be used to describe wares decorated with tree-like or dendritic patterns. These flowing designs, sometimes referred to as “seaweed” during the nineteenth century, were supposed to resemble agate, also known as “mocha stone” (Priddy 2004:171). These motifs were applied using an artist’s brush to release drops of a “mocha tea” solution containing ingredients such as urine, tobacco juice, ground iron scale and hops onto the wet slip-coated surface of the vessel. The design spread instantly when the acidic solution came into contact with the slip. Click here to view images.

Mocha decoration is first mentioned in potter’s invoices and depicted in pattern books in the last decade of the eighteenth century (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:122), although it may have been used as early as the 1780s (Rickard 2006:46). Mocha becomes rather rare on archaeological sites dating after 1850; however it began being produced on American yellow ware in the 1840s and continued to around World War I. In England, mocha production on British tavern mugs continued until the beginning of World War II when decoration was stopped as part of the war effort in 1939 (Miller 1991:6).

Multi-chambered Slip
This category includes designs known as “cat’s-eyes,” “cabling (or common cable)” and “twigging”. These designs were produced using a multi-chambered slip cup, which could deliver three or four different color clay slips simultaneously to the vessel. The earliest reference to multi-chambered slip pots came in a patent dated to 1811 (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:126). Since the types of designs created with multi-chambered slip pots do not appear in the 1792 Hartley Green & Co. pattern book, it is believed that they were not produced until the 19th century (Rickard 2006:13). Click here to view images.

Cats-eyes are produced from single drops from a multi-chambered slip cup, while overlapped drops formed a pattern known as “cabling,” “common cable” or “earthworm”. The term “finger-trailed”, used to describe cabling, is a misnomer—these wares were not finger-trailed. “Twigging,” produced when the tip of the slip cup was dragged across the vessel surface in a series of connected, opposing motions, was used as a decorative technique throughout the nineteenth century (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:128). Sussman (1997:17) describes twigging produced by a method that is “part trailing and part cat’s eye”. Click here to view images.

Trailed Slip and Offset Decoration
Trailed slip decoration is a direct development from earlier slip trailing used on coarse earthenwares of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Trailed slip designs incorporated curved lines, dots, squiggles, and representational images of flowers and leaves. Trailed slip designs were most often created using a single chamber slip cup, sometimes outfitted with multiple quills from which slip flowed. Multiple chamber slip cups could also be used to create multi-colored designs. Click here to view images.

Offset decoration was created by stamping clay slips onto the slip bands using tools akin to cookie cutters or using patterned templates of nail heads dipped into slip (Sussman 1997:10, Rickard 2006). These stamped designs, almost always circles and dots, are uncommon. Click here to view images.

Dipped Fan Decoration
These motifs have also been called palmate, lollipop, tobacco leaf, medallion, feather and balloon (Priddy 2004:174, Rickard 2006:99). One method of producing this design involved filling a small, round shallow container with different color slips in pie or wedge shaped segments, followed by dipping the side of the vessel into the slips. After sitting the vessel upright, gravity would cause the colored slips to run down towards the base, creating the handle of the fan. Fans could also be created using only one color of slip. The use of fan decoration began around 1805 and continued until around 1840 (Rickard 2006:101). Click here to view images.

Description

Fabric
Dipped decoration is found most commonly on English refined white earthenwares, on North American and English yellow and buff-bodied wares and more rarely on English and North American red earthenware. Refined white earthenwares have a hard, somewhat porous body, and thin walls. Crushed, finely ground silicon, feldspar, and occasionally kaolin, were added to the clay to produce a white body (Kybalová 1989:13).

Ware Type
Archaeologists have traditionally used the terms pearlware and whiteware to describe ceramic vessels decorated with printed motifs, but these terms are problematic. For a discussion of the evolution of creamware, pearlware, and whiteware, click here.

Glaze
Dipped earthenwares most commonly have a clear lead glaze. Colored glazes were added to specific areas in some instances.

Additional Decoration
Rouletted Bands – This decoration, which occurs frequently at the rim of vessels, was created with a embossed rouletting wheel. The leather hard vessel was held and turned on a lathe, while pressing the wheel into the desired area to create a band of repeating decoration. The rouletted area could be further defined with the application of colored glaze or slip. Rouletted rims were often painted over with a green glaze that would look darker in the deeper parts of the pattern, although blue or yellow is sometimes seen. This was a very common type from ca 1810 to ca 1860 (Miller 1991). Click here to view images.

Rilling - Rilling is another form of decoration that occurs frequently at the rims of vessels, consisting of a band of narrow groove made with a sharp-toothed tool. This type of decoration is also known as reeding (Rickard 2006:25). Click here to view images.

Encrustation – The addition of dried bits of clay, left in three dimensions, to the surface of a slipped vessel. This technique has also been referred to as “encrusted ware” (Towner 1963:47-48). Click here to view images.

Form
Dipped wares were almost always found in hollow utilitarian vessel forms—mugs, pitchers/jugs, bowls and chamber pots commonly found on North American archaeological sites. Other vessel forms include pepper pots (castors), master salts, mustard pots, teapots, coffeepots, cup and saucer sets, flowerpots, and beakers. Rarely seen forms include humidors, tobacco jars, dairy pans, treacle jars and bough pots.

References

Carpentier, Donald and Jonathan Rickard
2001   Slip Decoration in the Age of Industrialization. In Ceramics in America 2001. Edited by Robert Hunter.
           Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee, pp. 115-134.

Kybalová
1989   European Creamware. The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, London.

Miller, George L. Miller
1991   A Revised set of CC Index Values for Classification and Economic Scaling of English Ceramics from 1787
           to 1880. Historical Archaeology Vol 25, no. 1: 1-25.

Priddy, Sumpter
2004   American Fancy; Exuberance in the Arts, 1790-1840. Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee.

Rickard, Jonathan
2006   Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770-193. University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH.

Sussman, Lynne
1997   Mocha, Banded, Cat’s Eye, and Other Factory-Made Slipware. Studies in Northeast Historical
           Archaeology. Number 1. Boston University, Boston.

Towner, Donald
1963   The Leeds Pottery. Corey, Adams & Mackay, London.