Porcelain -- Collectors and collecting; Porcelain, English; Pottery -- Collectors and collecting; Pottery, English -- History
With regard to silver and gold lustre, that in all probability became
extinct for a little time, but in recent years the great demand for
silver lustre has produced a corresponding supply, manufactured abroad
for the English collector, but it is very inferior and easily detected
from the early examples by its coarse and dull surface and slovenly
finish.
The places where lustre ware is known to have been manufactured are at
Brislington, by R. Frank, about 1770; at Etruria, by Wedgwood, in 1780;
and by Wilson, in Staffordshire, in 1785; also by Moore & Co. and Dixon
& Co., at Sunderland, about 1820.
Swansea, at the Dillwyn pottery (of which we spoke in our “Chat” on
Swansea), also, about 1800, is known to have produced lustre ware.
[Illustration:
_W. G. Honey._] [_Cork._
SILVER LUSTRE JUGS.]
Different processes were employed in producing the lustre, but they
all consist in reducing the metal from a state of combination, by
dissolving it in some chemical, and depositing it in a particularly
thin layer on the surface of the pottery, so that it exhibits its
characteristic lustre without burnishing. As may readily be supposed,
the amount of platinum used for the silver ware, and gold for the
purple or gold lustre, is extremely small.
[Illustration: SILVER LUSTRE TEAPOT.]
Of the silver or platinum lustre very many fine examples exist, and
it is extremely popular owing to its similitude to old English silver
or plate. The sugar bowl we reproduce, with beaded pattern and fluted
design, is quite in the style of the Sheffield plate of the Georgian
period. Of the three silver lustre cream jugs, that in the extreme
right is of the same design, while the other two show at a glance the
beauty of form that silver lustre in its best period reached.
Other varieties of this silver lustre are quite plain, as in the teapot
we reproduce (p. 229), which is an example of a slightly later period.
This is a fine specimen of the unornamented variety of silver lustre
which is undistinguishable from silver. In fact the highly burnished
surface of such a teapot as this cannot be obtained on silver, the
lustre is of a richer and deeper quality. Alas! it possesses the
dangerous property of dissolving, like a fairy gift, into nothingness.
Elfin gold will turn into a circle of whirring, dancing, mocking
leaves, and if your wondrous lustre teapot slips to the ground, it lies
a heap of brown earthenware fragments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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