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Sunderland ship jug
Factory:
Dawson's Pottery
(Possibly)
Factory:
Scott Brothers & Co
(Possibly)
White earthenware, transfer-printed in black with text and images, and painted with enamels and pink lustre.
Bulbous body tapering slightly to a projecting foot, with cylindrical neck, curved lip and loop handle. Decorated on the body with three reserves in a mottled-pink lustred ground, which also covers the outside of the neck. There are a band of pink lustre around the inside of the rim and pink-lustre marks on the handle. Each reserve is transfer-printed and over-painted with red and green enamels, also with yellow and blue-grey enamel in the central reserve. The underside is flat and glazed, with a raised foot-rim.
The images and text are as follows:
(i) under the lip: a ship in full sail flanked by a sailor and a woman holding an anchor, personifying ‘Hope’.
(ii) a garland enclosing a verse: ‘This world is a good one to live in/To lend, to spend, to buy, or give in/But to beg, borrow, or get a mans own/It is such a world as never was known’
(iii) a garland enclosing the verse: ‘We Sailors are born for all Weathers/Great Guns let them blow high blow low/Our duty keeps us to our Tethers/And where the Gale drives we must go.’
History note: Billson collection until 1908. Sold at Sotheby’s 21 December 1908, lot 120, with two other Sunderland jugs, for 10 shillings. Bought by Mr S. Fenton for Dr Glaisher, Trinity College, Cambridge.
Dr J.W.L. Glaisher Bequest
Height: 18.6 cm
Width: 23 cm
Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1928) by Glaisher, J. W. L., Dr
19th Century, Early#
Circa
1820
CE
-
Circa
1840
CE
Sunderland potteries were particularly known for their use of thinly hand-painted lustre, before the glaze firing, together with hand-painted transfer-prints which feature designs, verses and mottos. The designs usually have local or topical relevance and often allude to seafaring. Mottled-pink lustre is also associated with Sunderland. Sometimes called ‘splashed lustre’, the effect is produced by spraying fine drops of oil onto still-wet lustre, which leaves the surface mottled when the oil burns away during firing.
The texts on this jug are both traditional English verses and their reproduction in contemporary anthologies and magazines attests to their popularity around 1820-40. The verse ‘We sailors are born for all weathers’ comes from a sailors’ song ‘The Tar for all Weathers’ about sailors battling a gale near Gibraltar, printed in ‘Hodgson's national songster’, 1832. The writer Washington Irving records seeing a slightly varied version of the rhyme ‘This world…’, on an inn window, in ‘Tales of a Traveller’, 1824; it also appeared in the monthly journal ‘The Nic-Nac’ the same year.
Decoration
composed of
lustre
( pink)
ceramic printing colour
enamel
Body
Accession number: C.1089-1928
Primary reference Number: 71294
Old object number: 2987
Stable URI
Owner or interested party:
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Associated department:
Applied Arts
This record can be cited in the Harvard Bibliographic style using the text below:
The Fitzwilliam Museum (2024) "Sunderland ship jug" Web page available at: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/71294 Accessed: 2024-12-22 17:21:15
To cite this record on Wikipedia you can use this code snippet:
{{cite web|url=https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/71294
|title=Sunderland ship jug
|author=The Fitzwilliam Museum|accessdate=2024-12-22 17:21:15|publisher=The
University of Cambridge}}
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<figure class="figure">
<img src="https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/aa/aa8/C_1089_1928_281_29.jpg"
alt="Sunderland ship jug"
class="img-fluid" />
<figcaption class="figure-caption text-info">Sunderland ship jug</figcaption>
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