Page 52 - THE BOOK MCLHHC

MAISON CHENAL & LACOUR HOUSE PROPERTIES & COLLECTION A Louisiana French Creole Tout Ensemble
ENGLISH POTTERY
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH POTTERY INVENTORY ANTIQUE PARALLELS OF ARCHAEOLOGICALLY RECOVERED SHARDS BY JACK HOLDEN
Early shelledge plate with classic impressed shell border.
English ceramics have been and continue to be exhaustively studied and collected. The Holden Collection does not pretend to be only the best ceramics but is a collection mainly of everyday material used in Louisiana during the end of the 18th through the middle of the 19th century - a period dominated by English world trade - the period of Maison Chenal.
Maison Chenal’s history begins in the last quarter of the 18th century. At that time the potteries of England were attempting to create a white ware to compete with Chinese export porcelain. By adding cobalt as a bluing agent to their glazes a new white ware called pearlware was created. The pooling or puddling of the blue glaze in the folds or crevices of the pottery is characteristic of pearlware or china, as this new ware was called. Pearlware soon dominated the English pottery trade and “China” became the adopted name for all tableware.
Pottery shards found on Louisiana sites dating from the late 18th century until the 1840s are almost always of pearlware. Indeed, in Louisiana, it was the age of pearlware. We love pottery shards and attempt to achieve relevance of our collection by matching intact examples with shards found in Louisiana. Beverly Straube writing for “Ceramics in America” on Facebook (March 31, 2015) referred to this as “Antique parallels of archaeologically recovered antiques”. A study of shards which we discovered while mud larking and exploring plowed fields or foraging the leavings of bottle diggers or dusty collection such as those left behind by Bill Groves has been a source of great pleasure and yielded much information and shards to be matched.
Much to our surprise, we soon realized, that except during the earliest colonial period, French pottery is rare in Louisiana. The French concentrated on quality and the English on the transition from the
handwork that quality demands to machine work and the production of large quantities of cheap wares – in other words, the industrial revolution. Cheap wares always find a way and in spite of strict trade restrictions large quantities of English pottery were pirated into Louisiana. The decisive victory for dominance of world trade was not France’s loss at the Battle of Trafalgar but the loss of the industrial revolution – cheap (read quantity) trumps quality - Britannia truly ruled the waves!
Less than 10% of the English ceramics in our collection are “collector quality” and some would be considered in poor condition. However, as a whole, the collection speaks of a time and place in Louisiana, the dominance of English trade, of pirates and of the industrial revolution with its cheap attractive pottery made available to even our poorest citizens. Noel Hume and his wife, well know archaeologists, collectors and curators, taught that a collection of everyday wares can speak of a time and place often more effectively than individual masterpieces. Chipstone Foundation understood. Fulfilling their mission statement they encouraged Noël Hume
Rim of a platter retailed in New Orleans by Henderson and Gaines (1836 – 1853).
An example of an early border pattern on a late platter.
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