Posted By: Tim
Posted on: 2011-10-05 13:46:50

Featured Item:
"Bacchanalian Dance" Jug by Charles Meigh

Quite apart from their tactile, sculptural appeal, English relief molded jugs, produced in profusion in the last three quarters of the nineteenth century, yield some interesting insights to those who consider them carefully. Through various examples one can trace the progression of style trends from the neoclassical,  to rococo and gothic revivals , and on to Japanese-inspired aesthetic movement designs. From the elaborately detailed designs of the century's first half to the later trend to simplify forms in the interest of function and cleanliness, they reflect a desire to provide a quality product for the expanding middle class market. Most of all, the variety of patterns result from the potter's urge to flex his muscles and to exercise the potential of developing manufacturing techniques.
  
Now and then a jug will provide not only these broad insights, but also a look at the personal interests of its maker. One such jug is Charles Meigh's 1844 "Bacchanalian Dance."

Dimensions:  Height 7 in. 

Mark:  Pad Mark

Dates:  Registered September, 1844

Price:  $425.00 each

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    A Connoisseur Potter
 
In his 1829 History of the Staffordshire Potteries, Simeon Shaw expresses admiration for C. Meigh, Esq., second generation of his family's proprietorship of the Old Hall pottery works. Meigh, he says, 

is esteemed for his firmness and decision of character, the arts have not a more liberal patron, for his means; nor the poor and defenceless a more firm protector. His modesty and candour are of general notice; and his friendship has never been known to be affected by the vicissitudes of fortune; nor has his kindness been withheld when the suffering could be alleviated (1).

Among these virtues it is his patronage of the arts that is of interest to us. In his Relief Molded Jugs 1820-1900, R. K. Henrywood further cites an 1846 description of Meigh's own collection of pictures, numbering over 200 examples of the works of admired artists (2). His artistic sophistication is demonstrated in his painstaking treatment of gothic architectural detail in his "Apostles" jug and in the complex elements of his depiction of Neptune's wife Amphitrite.

But even more revealing of his reverence for the masters is his jug celebrating the liberating, inebriating effects of wine.

In his "Bacchanalian Dance" jug, Meigh chose to recreate in relief  two paintings by seventeenth century masters--Nicholas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens. To provide a form to present these tableaus without distortion he created a most original shape centering on a cylinder with a straight sided profile. Around this band he wraps the two compositions, one to a side. Above and below the jug swells with a bounty of grape vines, forming an appropriately exuberant frame for the works of the baroque masters.

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    The Poussin Side

The Poussin painting is today known by the unwieldy title "Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term of Pan."

   

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      The Rubens Side
  
Turning the jug around, One is confronted with a less joyous view of inebriation. An old man, whose flabby and corpulent nakedness reveals the effects of long-term dissipation, is helped along by two satyrs and a group of revelers. They seem to be in an advanced drunken stupor. This is Silenus who was entrusted by Zeus with the jobs of guardian and tutor of Bacchus, the infant god of wine. A bit of a prophet, Silenus was mostly known as a drunk and is most often depicted propped up by his drinking buddies or about to fall off the back of a donkey.

        

      

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    Bad Habits Passed Down
  
I am reminded of Silenus and his two supporters by one of the charming putti groups designed in the eighteenth century for Josiah Wedgwood by the noblewoman and amateur artist Diana Beauclerk (shown here on an early nineteenth century glazed caneware jug currently available from Seekers).

     

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   More Silenus(es)
  
Charles Meigh was not entirely original in adapting Silenus in the relief decoration of a jug. Minton had produced a simpler treatment in 1831 that clearly seems based (more roughly) on Rubens's three central figures. Much earlier is a seventeenth century German ivory and silver tankard bearing a detailed version of the scene, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Toronto.  

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   Acknowledgements and Notes

Posted By: Mark
Posted on: 2011-07-31 00:19:41

Featured Item:
Red Transferware Dinner Plate
Edward and George Phillips "Polish Views"
"A Tear For Poland"

Earlier this year, some of us caught the excitement of change as we watched it catch hold in the eastern Mediterranean and Africa.  What an amazing phenomenon, this movement mounted by citizens on cell phones, Facebook, Twitter and the internet and the revolution they staged from within.  As freedom loving people, we celebrate their victories while wondering how they will conquer the challenges they have brought upon themselves.    

This springtime of revolution was not an entirely new phenomenon.   As July brought the celebrations of the Fourth and Bastille Day, and the realization that summer heat was finally here to stay, we could not help but think of those other Julys some two hundred years ago and the revolutions July heat brought with them.  With that in mind, we felt this would be a good time to look at one transfer pattern which bears witness to the fact that one can not always see the end to the change one envisions.  This month we look at Edward and George Phillips "Polish Views, A Tear For Poland" and the tragic Polish experience this series reflects.     

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Diameter:  10 3/4 in.

Date:  1830's  (George Phillips 1834-1848)

Price:  $225.00

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    Now and then when we first encounter a piece of transferware, we are totally puzzled.  This is one such case. What initially appears to be simply another piece of romantic tableware in fact reveals an enigmatic scene--a man and woman sit in a park surrounding an elaborate onion domed palace.  Typical enough, except the man appears to be weeping into his hands. Closer examination reveals a horseman wearing a distinctive, possibly military cap rounding the corner in the middle distance. Turning to the backstamp we find an innocuous enough pattern name, "Polish Views," but also a scene title that clearly indicates that something darker is involved, "A Tear for Poland." Transferware authority Dick Henrywood tells us that Phillip's "Polish Views" series includes these additional scenes: "Patriot's Departure," "Polish Prisoner," "The Enquiry," "The Messenger," "Wearied Poles," and "Wounded Poles."(1) These are hardly the subjects one expects to find in a pattern based merely on regional scenery.

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 As is often the case our puzzlement results because we have almost forgotten circumstances that in previous eras were well established as common knowledge. To examine what Poland represented to the 1830's public we turn to a remarkable book by Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness, Romantics, Patriots, And Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, which recounts in sweeping fashion the revolutionary movements, both successful and failed, that occupied Europe and the Americas during this pivotal period. 

 

   

  "A Tear for Poland"

 

The following eyewitness account from an 1832 political rally provides immediate access to the charge once carried by the phrase "A Tear for Poland" as well as the sentiments it inspired in England. 

 

"Another speaker was Count Napoleon Czapski, a Polish refugee, of whom it was whispered that he was to take a command in the army of the resistance.  As he made his short speech in broken English, a flag was carried past him with the inscription, "A Tear for Poland."  He most appropriately burst into tears, and amid deafening applause wiped his eyes upon the flag." (2)

 

The scene was a political rally held in Birmingham, May 7, 1832, in support of the English Reform Bill then undergoing scrutiny in the House of Lords.  Attendance was numbered at some 200,000 people from twenty towns and districts around Birmingham, including a deputation from Staffordshire. This was a rally of the middle and working classes of the industrial midland counties. While the reform of representation and voting rights was the primary agenda, time was allotted for the short address by the Polish count as well as another speaker urging English action in support of the Polish cause. Clearly what was going on in Poland had impressed itself on the consciousness of the British commoner. (3)

 

   Background

 

Poland . . .  in the late eighteenth century could look back upon some six hundred years of history as a European power.  However, at this point her neighbors, Prussia, Russia and Austria regarded Poland as nothing more than a buffer state protecting their own interests.  When in 1768 conflicts between a reform-minded king and the nobility led to insurrection, neighboring powers intervened, ultimately giving them the opportunity to appropriate significant swaths of Polish territory in what came to be known as the first partition of Poland. A second partition followed in 1791 which included the installation of a puppet government controlled by Catherine the Great.  Polish rebels, having fled the state now organized and conducted a campaign from the outside.  In 1794, peasants joined returning patriots, marching toward confrontation with the occupying forces armed only with their harvest tools. Early successes fed the cause of the patriots. By November of that year, however, returning Russian troops breached the defenses of Warsaw and butchered some 20,000 in the suburb of Praga. A third partition, resulting in the complete abolishment of the Polish state, followed in 1795. 

 

The annihilation of the nation by the three surrounding powers was so thorough that mention of the name Poland was forbidden.  The almost immediate result was the flowering of Polish societies in every urban center in Europe.  In effect, Poland became a country without boundaries fed on the legends of Praga and the peasant farmers armed only with their scythes.  According to one young aristocrat who had escaped to Paris, " Poland is wherever people are fighting for liberty."  Alienated by the Prussians, Russians and Austrians, the Poles rallied to serve in the French military, eventually becoming some of Napoleon's elite corps.  Even in 1795, as the conquering powers bickered over the apportionment of the debts of the now extinct nation, Polish units marched with those of revolutionary France to a song whose first line affirmed,  "Poland has not perished while still we live."

 

  And the rest of Europe . . .  grieved.  The Poles did not grieve alone for their lost homeland.  The same jubilation which had met the news of the American successes in the 1770's turned to lamentation with the news of the annihilation of the Polish state in 1795. Zamoyski details the expression of this widespread despair in the arts. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of "murdered Hope," in a sonnet bewailing Polish military leader Kosciuszko's defeat.  In the public imagination, the Polish patriot took on a hallowed status not unlike Washington, a paragon of Spartan virtue. Dwelling on the Polish freedom fighters capture, the Scots poet Thomas Campbell spoke for the public in his lines:  "Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell, / And Freedom shriek'd -- as Kosciuszko fell!"  George Galloway, another Scottish poet published a book of poetry around the theme of Poland, The Tears of Poland (Edinburgh, 1795) (4).  In France even  Jacques-Louis David caught the Polish mania with his design for the appropriate dress for delegates to the French Convention in 1794-- a combination of pseudo Roman garb topped off with the traditional Polish konfederatka cap.(5)  The heroic aspect of the Polish struggle against overwhelming odds provided grist for the public imagination, stirring outrage in the cause of martyred innocence. 

 

 

 

 

Thaddeus Kosciuszko by Benjamin West (Google Images)

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Obviously, the impact of Poland's story did not occur in a vacuum. Zamoyski points to two events of the period which had forever changed the traditional notion that the sovereignty of nations rests in the person of the king and with his court. The first was the birth of America, a nation created by its people and whose sovereignty rested in the hands (and hearts) of those people.  The second event took place on that engine of change, the guillotine, with the execution of Louis XVI, dramatically demonstrating that the sovereignty of the nation was not contained in an individual, that he could be killed and the nation still exist. 

 

 With the onset of the nineteenth century and the frustration of many of the hopes for change, revolutionary zeal gave way to the introspection and frequent despair of the Romantic movement.  In preceding decades great change was dreamed of and achieved.  In this new age, one could only dream of the feats of other days with no hope of impacting the structure of power which had been re-established over Europe with the end of the Napoleonic wars.  Throughout Europe, a surfeit of out-of-work soldiers struggled to return to the boredom of everyday life after the glories and excitement of war.  Furthermore, a generation raised to dream of nothing but the excitement of service now felt cheated and disillusioned with the advent of peace.  Together these segments only added to a general sense of silent resignation and despondency.

 

   The shift in mood was particularly pertinent to Poland.  Poland's fate continued to be subject to foreign masters, first Napoleon, later Czar Alexander I, Catherine's grandson, who saw it as his mission to re-establish the noble state. However, as Alexander saw himself as head, conflicts soon developed as the Poles started to strive for self determination.  Alexander pre-empted any sense of independence generating a state of constant tension, conflict and of hopelessness.   In 1830 yet another uprising was defeated. In Paris Frederic Chopin expressed his anxiety for friends and family back in Warsaw, generating one of the supreme Romantic expressions of Polish concern and despair.  This was his Scherzo in B minor Op. 20 and his "Revolutionary" Etude, in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12.     

 

   This sense of a lost cause provides the immediate context for the titles in Phillips' "Polish Views" series with their references to prisoners, wounds, weariness and tears. This is a pattern that reflects not only the specific Polish cause, but also the larger Romantic disposition. 

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Poland, The Staffordshire Potters, and the Phillips Partnership 

  

While the government of England remained in place during the tide of revolution in Europe, the feelings of its citizens were strongly aroused by events on the continent. British expressions of sympathy for the Greeks in their struggle against the Turks are well documented, particulary among the elite class educated in the Greek classics. Identification with the scythe wielding peasant and outrage at Russian brutality did not require such sophistication and, Zamoyski tells us, was particularly strong in manufacturing centers. As we saw at the 1832 Birmingham rally, radicals linked the Polish cause to domestic political reform. Some argued that the strengthening of those powers that ravaged Poland had a direct negative impact on Britain and its tradespeople. (6 )

 

We have to wonder if George and Edward Phillips were included in the Staffordshire deputation to the reform rally. Was it there that they picked up that phrase central to their "Polish Views," "A Tear for Poland," or perhaps from the journalistic accounts that followed?  The Staffordshire potters were well known for involving themselves in current events and expressing their views directly on their tea and dinnerwares. Plates and vessels became partisan placards on tariff issues, controversies like the unfortunate treatment of George IV's consort Caroline, and such causes as the Great Reform Bill.  In 1832, the Phillips brothers had been in business for ten years.  At least one of them had come to the partnership already an accomplished, established potter.(7)(8)  Another of their "romantic" patterns of the same time period carries its own added political message.  "Commerce" depicts exotic scenes of British tradesmen negotiating their deals in exotic eastern ports. Its backstamp, however, bears the additional proclamation "Free Trade."

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  The Scene: "A Tear For Poland"

 

Shortly after the 1795 dissolution of Poland, emigres of the Polish society in Venice received approval from the governing French to create a Polish legion for French military service.  Five thousand troops were almost immediately mustered.  Rumor had it that this new legion, in concert with another legion of emigres was about to mount a campaign to take back the motherland.  Their marching song , which would become the national anthem was all about their return from Italy to Poland.  In one of the verses, an old man in Poland sheds tears of joy as he and his daughter catch the distant sound of those drums announcing the patriot's return to Poland.(9)  In Phillips' scene, the distant horseman, who may be wearing the distinctive Polish headgear, the konfederatka, perhaps represents those patriots' return.  For all who knew of Poland--who knew this marching song--this plate must have signified something dear to their sentiments.   

 

  Conclusion

  

"A Tear for Poland" is unambiguous on the Polish question. However was the series relevant to Poland alone?  Was the Polish cause identified with the broader cause of liberty as the Polish emigre in Paris proclaimed? The British manufacturers certainly believed their fortunes were linked to those of Poland.  Zamoyski leans toward universal identification with the cause of liberty, quoting a young lawyer in Hungary "the cause of the Poles is the cause of Europe and I can boldly affirm that whoever does not honour the Poles . . . does not love his own motherland."(10)  Given the independent streak of the Staffordshire potters I would bet that "Polish Views" represented a statement against despots everywhere.

 

Just think what those potters could/would have done with the events of this spring.  And consider, what cause do we believe in so strongly that we would allow it to invade our dinnerware? 

 

Later,  Mark 

 

 

 

(1) Henrywood, Dick, "Henrywood's Highlights, Transferware from a British Perspective",  No. 2 , "Polish Views" Series, http://www.transcollectorsclub.org/Henrywood/hh-2.html

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(2)  Wallas, Graham, "The Story of Eleven Days (May 7th - 18th, 1832)", From The Fortnightly Review , in The Living Age, Volume 196 (Littell, Son and Co., 1893); p. 344-354. (Google e-books.)   

 

(3) Wakefield, C.M., The Life of Thomas Atwood (London, 1885); p. 197-206.  (Google e-books)

 

(4) Galloway, George, The Tears of Poland (Edinburgh, 1795).  (Cornell University Library; e-commons at Cornell) 

 

(5) Zamoyski, Adam, Holy Madness, Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871; Il. No. 11, "Representant du Peuple", between p. 114-115.  (New York, Viking, Penguin-Putnam, 2000)

 

(6) Zamoyski, p. 276

 

(7) Coysh, A.W, Blue-Printed Earthenware 1800-1850; p. 56. (North Pomfret, Vermont, David & Charles Inc., 1980)

 

(8) While this example of Phillips "Polish Views" is marked GP, other pieces are known marked E & G (Edward and George Phillips) indicating introduction prior to Edward's death in 1834.  George continued potting through 1848 although the rococo style of the blank was increasingly out of fashion by the early 1840's. 

 

(9) Zamoyski, p.122

 

(10) Zamoyski, p. 277

 

Sources
 
Coysh, A.W. Blue-Printed Earthenware 1800-1850 .  David & Charles Inc., North Pomfret, Vermont, 1980

 

Zamoyski, Adam Holy Madness, Romantics, Pariots, And Revolutionaries, 1776-1871 .   Viking, Penguin-Putnam, Inc., New York, 2000  

 

Zamoyski, Adam; Rites of Peace, The Fall of Napoleon and The Congress of Vienna.  Harper-Collins, New York, 2007