English Spatterware Pottery
Spatterware is an early 19th century English china pottery made in the Staffordshire region and known for its colorful “spattered” or “stippled” decoration. Pieces were decorated in one to five colors, usually arranged in stripes or concentric bands. The colors often bordered another decorative device, such as a peafowl, schoolhouse, fort, etc. Today these devices have given their names to the pattern designations used by collectors. The most rare decorative forms include “Rainbow” color stripes, fish, cow, shed, town house or two men on a raft.
Spatterware was very inexpensive and English potters exported it throughout the world from 1820 to 1850, but their primary market was Federal America, and especially the Pennsylvania Germans who loved its bright colors. The spatter market peaked in the 1830′s to 1840′s as more durable gaudy and transfer decorated ironstone wares began to find their way into the mass market.
Spatterware was made in a wide variety of forms, including covered coffee and tea pots, pitchers, platters, cups and saucers, waste and larger bowls, mugs, plates of various sizes, vegetable dishes, sugar bowls and cramers, casters, salts, mustard pots and more. Form is important, particularly among the pitchers, but decoration trumps all when it comes to value.
The Colonial Revival period of the 1920′s again brought the folky spatter pieces to the attention of collectors. When Henry Ford and Henry du Pont bought spatter for their museum collectons the collecting interest ignited. Even more serious attention was attracted to the genre when Sam Laidaicker included spatterware in his Anglo-American china publications in the 1930′s and 1940′s, followed by the publication of the Homespun Ceramics: A Study of Spatterware booklet by Arlene and Paul Greaser in 1964 and Earl and Ada Robacker’s 1978 book, Spatterware and Sponge: Hardy Perennials of Ceramics.