![[THE DEATH OF WOLFE]](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2015/CSK/2015_CSK_11172_0069_000(the_death_of_wolfe_an_english_creamware_transfer_printed_baluster_jug060933).jpg?w=1)
THE DEATH OF WOLFE – COMMEMORATIVE WARE
‘Intense public interest in what has been described as the most popular military print in the history of art prompted the earliest of the Canadian views on earthenware. In the eighteenth century it caught the attention of the foremost potter of the day. Almost half a century later nineteenth-century potters were still making use of the same theme. This early view was not topographical but a death scene: the death of General James Wolfe, on 13 September 1759 at Quebec. The leading potter to make use of it was Josiah Wedgwood. The unprecendentedly popular engraving was William Woollett’s “Death of Wolfe” after Benjamin West’s painting … The painting itself, from which the engraving was made, is now in Ottawa in the National Gallery of Canada. The English porcelain makers had been the first to seize upon military and naval heoes of the Seven Years War (1756-63). From Bow to Worcester came commemorative items. … It was, however, the powerful effect of West’s painting and the engravings after it that gave a subject from the Seven Years War its widest distribution: and it was earthenware potters, not porcelain makers, who capitalized on the long-lasting popularity of a Canadian historical scene. … The painting had been an instant success; William Woollett’s engraving of it published on 1 January 1776, made it known to almost everyone. … It was more likely to have been Woollett’s engraving than West’s actual painting which first caught the eye of the makers of earthenware. The greatest potter of them all, Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95) rarely went to London without hunting in the print shops for subjects of his creamware (called by him “Queen’s Ware” after Queen Charlotte began using it in the 1760s). Woollett’s engraving went on sale in the London print shops in 1776. It was about two or three years later that the “Death of Wolfe” began making its appearance on such Wedgwood items as teapots and jugs. When a published engraving was taken up for pottery decoration, some changes had usually to be made. There would hardly have been room on a piece of pottery for all the figures West had included in that death scene. It was, therefore, the central group and the figures on the right only that were used on this creamware. … The printing on these items was not done at Wedgwood’s pottery in Staffordshire but in Liverpool. Early in the 1760s Wedgwood had entered into an arrangement with the Liverpool printers, John Sadler and Guy Green, to execute work for him on his creamware. … The death scene was reproduced not only as printed but as moulded decoration by earthenware potters working at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Plaques moulded in low relief were produced in several sizes, the figures touched with colours in the distinctive palette that characterizes what are loosely termed Pratt wares. Just where all these plaques originated is not known, but potters in England and Scotland did this type of work. The makers of stoneware provide still further evidence of the continuing interest in the scene as painted by West and engraved by Woollett. Herculaneum, the Liverpool pottery founded in 1796 and for which George Pozer of Quebec and Edward Alport of Halifax both became agents, made use of it as relief decoration on jugs that are in date c.1800-10. Samuel Hollins, a Staffordshire potter, used it on buff stoneware of about the same date. It turns up, too, on unmarked black basalts teaware.’
E. Collard, The Potter’s View of Canada. Canadian Scenes on Nineteenth Century Earthenware, Kingston and Montreal, 1983, pp.11-14.
[THE DEATH OF WOLFE]
An English creamware transfer printed baluster jug, circa 1780
细节
[THE DEATH OF WOLFE]
An English creamware transfer printed baluster jug, circa 1780
printed with the Death of Wolfe after Benjamin West and a naval engagement, enriched in gilding with the monogram 'DDR'
9¾in. (24.8cm.) high
An English creamware transfer printed baluster jug, circa 1780
printed with the Death of Wolfe after Benjamin West and a naval engagement, enriched in gilding with the monogram 'DDR'
9¾in. (24.8cm.) high
来源
with J.J. May.