Tigerish teapot spotted in Denmark!

Pal’s striped teapot

We are very grateful to a Norwegian reader of this blog, Pal Furuberg, who has kindly sent photographs of a ‘tigerish’, striped teapot that he bought at a  a flea market at a children’s school in the outskirts of Oslo. A friend had told him about Manchester Museum’s ‘smashing pot’ with similar ‘tigerish’, striped transfer pattern, which looks very much like the one Pal, or Paul, bought.

Victorian teapot in Manchester Museum

Pal writes to say that the pewter  lid may not be original. There is no mark or stamp, and he cannot tell for sure whether it is Georgian or Victorian, but it is most probably English he says.

Replacement lid on Pal’s teapot

Well, we might be able to set Pal’s mind at rest. I sent a photo of our teapot to the Ceramics and Glass Collection enquiry service at the Victoria and Albert Museum. One of the curators there, Rebecca Wallis, replied and told me that “From the images the teapot looks to date from the second quarter of the 19th century, underglaze brown transfer-printed decoration imitating woodgrain. The pot was probably made in Staffordshire.”

Transfer-printed design on Pal’s teapot

Unfortunately they don’t have a comparable example in the V&A collections so Rebecca suggested contacting the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery to see what they have.

Paul writes that his teapot is a bit discoloured, has an old reparation on the handle, and has cracks that makes it un-useful as a teapot, but he like its and thinks it looks good. I say good for you Pal. I only wish my trips to the car boot sale and flea market were as successful as yours!

I am constantly amazed by the power of crowd-sourcing to answer some of the questions about mysterious objects that we are faced with as curators. The coincidence of showing the Manchester teapot on the blog and Pal buying his teapot with the same design about the same time and sending us details is fantastic.

Thanks to Pal for allowing us to reproduce his photos and to Rebecca for identifying the teapot. Pity about the woodgrain though, I quite liked calling it the Manchester tigerish teapot.

Now all we need is for a reader to send in a reply to my appeal about the so-called  brothel token with an erotic scene… I mean, have you any idea how many visitors we’ve had to the Ancient Worlds blog since that was posted?

Smashing Pot

Teapot from Manchester

This is a recently conserved teapot from one of the Roman Manchester sites excavated during the 1970s and 1980s by the late Prof Barri Jones. The excavators dug through through more recent Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian layers before they reached the area of Roman occupation. The later material was not a priority as part of the research aims but the objects, mostly  broken pieces of pottery, were retained and are in the Museum store. We bring out the pottery every so often for events, so that visitors can try their hand at piecing together the three-dimensional jigsaws. So popular has this activity proved that we can now boast a number of almost complete Victorian and Edwardian vessels.

This example of a teapot was rebult for us by Jenna B. who has been on a conservation placement with the Museum from the University of  Lincoln. A lot of the time-consuming work had already been done by visitors and Young Archaeologists Club members who put together like with like and joined them using sticky tape. All Jenna had to do was clean the sherds and glue them together. This was one of her final projects and what a great job she has done. It is only a pity that there were insufficient sherds surviving to enable us to attach the spout. We tried to find them in the boxes of mixed sherds but it’s rather like hunting the needle in the proverbial haystack. The teapot provides a good example for staff to use when discussing the ethics of conservation. At what point does a reconstruction become worthwhile?

Victorian teapot

The teapot has a rather interesting transfer printed pattern that I can only describe as ‘tigerish’. I wonder if this is Georgian rather than Victorian or later. Perhaps a visitor to the Blog can enlighten us?

Jenna working on the Georgian/Victorian teapot