What’s Happening

People ask me all the time to tell them what’s happening in Baltimore, so I have two upcoming events to tell you about that I am involved with.

First is the Valleys Planning Council’s Art  for Land’s Sake Show & Sale, a biannual event featuring local artists. The Valleys Planning Council’s mission is to conserve land and resources, preserve historic character and maintain the rural feel and land uses in the valleys just north of Baltimore, a place where I spend a lot of time.

Here are some of my favourite pieces in the show.

Art for Land’s Sake is held at the stunning Caves Farm, a large historic equestrian center just north of Baltimore. Tickets to the Preview Party on Friday, October 20th are available here. Tickets for Saturday and Sunday are $5.00 per person. Click here for more details.

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I am a charter member of Team Tea Caddy, three of us working on a major exhibition of historic tea caddies at Homewood House at the Johns Hopkins University, beginning Sunday, November 5th. I didn’t know much about tea caddies until recently, and have discovered that they tell the fascinating history of the movement of tea from China to England and then on to America. In the 1700’s, tea was more valuable than gold, and these caddies show how it was treasured.

The earliest were made of china and porcelain, and then silver, wood, tortoiseshell and ivory.

While many of the forms are similar, their decoration and origin is literally all over the map!

This amazing collection has been assembled by Mark Bramble, Broadway producer, director and the writer of 42nd Street, which just re-opened in London earlier this year. Because of his extensive travels writing and producing Broadway shows, he’s had the opportunity to add pieces to his collection from all over the world.

The exhibition will be open from November 5th through December 15 at Homewood House & Museum. Mark will be giving a free lecture (tix are required) on his collection and signing his book on November 16th at Johns Hopkins University.

I hope to see you at one or both of these wonderful events.

Cheese Domes

No, that’s not the name of some sports stadium in Wisconsin (but it might be!). It’s something I found at auction the other week and since I acquired it, I’ve been doing a little research on cheese domes. I am not talking about those glass and teak cheese domes that everyone who got married in the 1970’s and 1980’s received as a wedding present.

This is what I am talking about. A seriously big, porcelain dome! Very trendy during the Victorian era, and like so much during that time, frequently over-decorated!

Many of the majolica cheese domes were made by George Jones & Sons, an English pottery, active in Stoke-on-Trent from 1861 to 1951. They specialized in majolica, and cheese domes fit within their line of wares.

The cheese dome I got is similar to some of the majolica ones from George Jones, but much simpler. While it has the basket weaving around the base, and the branch handle on the top, it lacks the dogwood flowers. To see a whole range of George Jones cheese domes, click here.

Hmmm… looking at the one on the left makes me wonder if I don’t have the plate upside down! It has the same basket weave on it and I was curious why it would be on the bottom of the plate!

Since there are no markings on the platter, it’s hard to tell!

Here’s another one with the fencing, or basket weave.

Cheese domes like this were used to keep cheeses at room temperature, as they are better that way instead of straight out of the fridge. Especially soft cheese like brie or Camembert. A tall cheese dome like the one I got might be used to store an English cheese like stilton which is often in a tall cylindrical shape. It is another cheese that benefits from being eaten at room temperature.

There is also another style of cheese dome, and that’s in a wedge shape.

This would be for smaller cheeses, and perhaps ones that are more wedge shaped, like a nice English cheddar or a Welsh Caerphilly (which is what I wanted to name Connor).

The cheese wedge I have has some small ridges to keep the cheese slightly elevated, and make it easier to cut.

All of the ones I’ve seen have a small hole in the lid so that the cheese can breathe. If a cheese can’t breathe, it can acquire that ammonia smell which is rather unpleasant.

If you’d like to see more cheese domes, do a search on Pinterst. There are plenty to see!

Out Damn Spot!

I’ve gotten a number of questions about how to remove spots from the blue and white china that I bought last weekend.

Here’s what happens with china. As it’s used and it ages, it gets very small cracks in the glaze called crazing. There’s not a lot you can do about a piece that’s already crazed. Dirt, grease and other disgusting things get into the crazing and cause discolouration. The image above is from a planter, so it’s probably dirt. In my pieces, it’s probably grease.

There are a few things that you can do to try and get rid of the stains. My friend Reggie Darling has a long piece about using hydrogen peroxide to remove stains. It’s a lengthy process, involving submerging the piece in hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) for several days and then baking it for a few minutes in an ELECTRIC oven (as gas ovens could cause an explosion!). You can read about the process and Reggie’s results, here. They were dramatic. You can either get lots of smaller bottles of H2O2 at the drug store, or a larger bottle, which is a higher percentage, at a beauty supply store.

Another suggestion is to make a past of a cleanser like Comet®, or something that has some bleach in it, and spread it over the stains. You can leave it overnight and see what it does. Do not use bleach full-strength as that can damage the porcelain.

Since the old tureen I have is already pretty badly damaged, I put some Soft Scrub® on it and left it all day long. The process cleaned the dish up a bit, but some of the stains go all the way through the china.

The piece does date from the 1830’s, so that’s excuse enough for me to be a little worse for the wear.

Other suggestions for cleaning china are denture tablets, water softener with a Z code, and naval jelly, which is terribly caustic. Natural options include a paste of white vinegar and salt, baking soda and water, or a past of Oxyclean® and water.

What are your tips for cleaning china?

Cracking the Code

I was at an auction this past weekend, and I bought several lots of old blue and white china. I am always checking the marks to see who made the piece, when it was made and where it was made. I use a site called The Potteries, which is out of Stoke-on-Trent in England. This is where most of the English china, porcelain and pottery was made for several hundred years.

Each pottery has its own marks, and as owners and times changed, so did the marks.

Generally, if you can pick one or two words out of the back mark, you can find out all sorts of things. The mark above has the maker, the pattern the date of manufacture and the type of material. The maker is Charles Meigh, the pattern is Verenese, the dates are embossed in the clay and then glazed, so they’re hard to read, and the material is improved stone china. Then when I look at The Potteries site, I can find out more.

I can now discern that the piece was made between 1835 and 1849, by a process of elimination: there’s a CM in the mark and the Improved Stone China, so that leaves the piece as being made in the 14 years between 1835 and 1849.  If it had either of the two other marks, I’d have dated it later.

Some china can be dated even more specifically than that. This is a mark from a piece I also bought on Saturday.

There are several clues here: Wedgwood & Co. The & Co. differentiates in from just Wedgwood according to years and some other factors. The unicorn also differentiates is as export-ware – mainly to the USA. Melton is the pattern, which is pretty simple. But what do all of the other marks mean?  There are lots of clues here.

So, using the guide, I can tell this is ceramic, made on January 30, 1883, and it was the 12th bundle made that day. There is a list of what each letter and number means. However, there are actually two lists, as they ran out of letters, so had to start again, switching places of the numbers and letters. The first set of marks were used from 1842-1867 and the second set from 1868-1883.

Here are some of the other marks on pieces I won.

H.A. & Co, Oriental pattern, dating between 1861 and 1880

W.E. Corn, dating from about 1905, in the Ormonde pattern.

These pieces of flow blue are from the ship, Lucania, which sailed in the late 1800’s.

Furnivals, later bought by Wedgwood, dating 1890 to 1913.

Furnivals, from the same piece as above

W. Adam & Sons, stone china, pattern name is in the shield, dates between 1835 and 1855. I love the face in the wave! Do you see it?

To learn about English silver hallmarks, please click here for a post I did about them several years ago.

Wedgwood Museum Collection May Be Sold in a Pension Dispute

From the Guardian…

Supporters of the award-winning Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent are launching a battle to save priceless examples of Josiah Wedgwood's work from being sold to the highest bidder.

The contents of the museum, managed by the independent Wedgwood Museum Trust, are under threat because of a huge pension debt left after the ceramics company went into bankruptcy.

A complex law introduced to protect the 7,000 former factory workers at the site means that the trust, if found legally liable this autumn, may be forced to sell its collection to meet the £134m shortfall of its former parent company, the Wedgwood Group.

New owners took over the brand last year and the trust was forced into administration this spring, although the museum remains open while the future of its contents is decided.

"It would be desecration if this incredible collection was broken up for sale," said Alison Wedgwood, of the family, as a campaign to preserve its heritage was launched. Among the items that could be lost are precious "first day" vases, dating from June 1769, when Wedgwood moved his renowned ceramics works to a new factory he called Etruria in Staffordshire, and then personally threw six celebratory pots to mark the event – fashioning them into regal vases. Later that year he told his colleague Thomas Bentley that the vases should "be finished as high as you please, but not sold, they being the first fruits of Etruria".

A legal decision is expected in October. If lawyers rule that the trust is liable for the shortfall, the collection will be stripped of its unique assets. "But this would not mean a penny more for pensioners in Stoke. It is not about that," said Alison Wedgwood, an economist who is the wife of Josiah's descendant Tom Wedgwood. "It is just that the national Pension Protection Fund cannot step in until the legal matter has been decided." Wedgwood and her husband argue that it would be "a tragedy" to see the collection sold separately, and a decision against the trust would have damaging implications for similar trusts set up to protect historic items. The factory site is still used to make high-end ceramics, though most of the porcelain is now made in Indonesia.

Josiah, who was born in 1730 and died in 1795, invented and produced three of Wedgwood's most famous ceramics – Queen's Ware, Black Basalt and Jasper. He named the Etruria factory after the district of Italy where black Etruscan porcelain was excavated, and he turned the family business into a pottery empire with quality as its trademark.

"He was a force of unstoppable energy, funny and fierce, tender to his family and ruthlessly determined in business," according to the writer Jenny Uglow, who is campaigning to safeguard the collection. "He also combined a set of qualities rarely found in a single person: a genius for chemistry, a passion for good design, a daring, innovative style in manufacturing and a genius for marketing."

Bone china made in his Stoke works graced the best tables of the world for hundreds of years, including in the dining room of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose tureen serving dish is part of the collection. In recent years, sales of china have suffered due to changing social trends. Now the people of the Potteries fear the museum may go the way of the Minton Museum collection. Once this passed into the hands of Royal Doulton, much of it was sold as individual lots at auction.What a shame.

Wedgwood Editorial in the NYT

There was an excellent editorial in the New York Times today about the Wedgwood bankrputcy. One of the main points was something I said the other day: If the current company used the sales and other innovative techniques that Josiah Wedgwood developed, they wouldn't be in trouble today. They simply have not kept up with the times.

Here's the article in full:

They Broke It
By Judith Flanders
London
THE crystal and ceramics company Waterford Wedgwood, whose roots go back 250 years, has been placed in administration, or what is called bankruptcy protection in the United States. While high manufacturing costs, declining demand for luxury goods and a weak dollar may have precipitated matters, this is not a credit-crunch story — it is a history lesson.

The company is in trouble because it has long forgotten the lessons of one of its founders: Josiah Wedgwood, among the greatest and most innovative retailers the world has ever seen. If the modern operators of Wedgwood, which was merged with Waterford Glass in 1986, had shown a tenth of Josiah’s intuitive grasp, his flair, his zest for selling, it would not now be dying.

Today when most people think of Wedgwood, they think of bridal registries and those dusty-looking blue-and-white jasperware plates that no one knows what to do with. But things were once very different.

Josiah was an unlikely hero. He was the 13th child of an impoverished potter; a childhood case of smallpox left Josiah with a bad leg that was later amputated, making it impossible for him to turn a potter’s wheel. But if he could not physically throw a pot, he could — and did — find new ways to get goods to market. He threw himself into various schemes to improve roads and canals. And, more fundamentally, he developed new ways of selling. Most, if not all, of the common techniques in 20th-century sales — direct mail, money-back guarantees, traveling salesmen, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, illustrated catalogues — came from Josiah Wedgwood.

First, of course, came the product. In 1759, Josiah set up a small company in Stoke-on-Trent, in west-central England, to produce earthenware, a cheap, everyday material that was dull, porous and broke easily. But by the 1760s, he made a technical breakthrough and produced “creamware,” a rich, creamy-looking glazed pottery that looked like porcelain but was able to withstand temperature changes. Soon Josiah had even worked out how to print designs on it — all this, at a relatively inexpensive price.

Its worth was quickly recognized: in 1765, Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, ordered a creamware tea set. For most people, that would be the pinnacle; for Josiah, it was the start. He now called himself “Potter to Her Majesty” and renamed creamware “Queen’s Ware.” In a letter to his business partner, he marveled at “how rapidly the use of it has spread” and “how universally it is liked,” and tried to balance how much this had to do with its royal “introduction” versus “its utility and beauty.”

That is the true Wedgwood. It wasn’t pleasure at past achievement, but instead determination to understand why success had come about, so he could build on it. Selling was an intellectual pleasure, an art form.

No fad was too small. In 1772, when women started bleaching their hands with arsenic to make their skin a fashionable porcelain tone, Wedgwood immediately advertised black teapots: against this background, hands looked even whiter. No cause was too great, either: the company produced emancipation medallions asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?” that were worn as buttons and bracelets.

Until Wedgwood came along, most companies had seen royal commissions as nothing but grief: they were one-offs and, therefore, profits were negligible. When Catherine the Great ordered a 925-piece dinner service in 1773, Wedgwood made perhaps £200 on an outlay of nearly £3,000. But as a marketing tool, the set was beyond price. Each piece had an image of a stately home, and before the order was dispatched, Josiah exhibited it in his showroom so that visitors could see whose houses were immortalized. Naturally, duplicate pieces were available for purchase.

Today, in the Waterford Wedgwood showroom here on Piccadilly the various lines of china are piled up bargain-basement style. While the product is still good, the marketing is dreadful. The company has been both profligate and miserly — it has hired hot designers, but then has scrimped by not spending money to change the molds; as a result, contemporary design is crudely imposed on 100-year-old shapes. Indeed, the company has returned to Josiah’s “diffusion” principle — offering cheaper lines for different segments of the population — but has failed to advertise this fact.

As the news of the company’s travails broke this week, it was clear from Web chatter that most people think Wedgwood is a “luxury” and a “traditional” brand, with no inexpensive lines or innovative designers. Neither is true, but perception, as Josiah knew, is the ultimate truth. Twenty-first century Wedgwood has been more old-fashioned than 18th-century Wedgwood, and that has been its undoing.

Judith Flanders is the author of “Inside the Victorian Home.”

Wedgwood in an Ikea World

Another interesting take on the recent news about Waterford/Wedgwood is in this article from the Times of London. Take a look.

The ironic thing is that Josiah Wedgwood was a huge innovator and self-promotor, two things that the current company was lacking.

Waterford/Wedgwood Files for Bankruptcy

It was just announced that the Waterford/Wedgwood group has filed for bankruptcy. Waterford Wedgwood's lenders had repeatedly given the company extra time to arrange new funding and agreed to defer loan payments until 2 January. It has been negotiating with a US private equity firm over the sale of a controlling stake in return for taking on its debts and providing $280m of capital. But the company's board was forced to call in the receivers after its lenders, led by Bank of America, refused to postpone its interest payments for a fourth time.

The firm has posted a loss for the last five financial years, as declining demand for its products pushed sales down. Its future has been uncertain for months, despite attempts to cut costs by closing some sites and moving production to eastern Europe and Indonesia. Thousands of jobs have already been lost in the UK and Ireland.

Here's an interesting article about this.

From: The Guardian