1 10 4 https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/e65161bbcaf78d2fb500834894ef1164.jpg 6eb3ea8545ff874739852c3f19f957d3 Exhibition Item Title Glass Epergne Category Glass and Ceramics Description This cut glass epergne (table centrepiece) has 40 separate pieces. It is about a meter in height and was made by the Holyrood Flint Glass Company, Edinburgh, between 1840 and 1842, to mark the accession of Queen Victoria. An epergne was a glittering centrepiece for a dinner table and was often the largest and most valuable item of tableware on display. They were made of silver or glass or both, in multiple pieces, often embellished with coats of arms. Epergnes were sometimes made as wedding gifts or as commemorative presentation pieces to mark a special event. They were popular in the eighteenth century when they normally included bowls for candid fruits or nuts and they also typically held candles. In the nineteenth century, with changes in the way that meals were served and the introduction of oil lamps, the epergne was less likely to be used as a food container or for lighting effects and was either entirely decorative or held flower arrangements. This epergne was made for a royal table setting and was used on state occasions at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. It was also displayed at the international exhibition displays that were mounted by the company – as in Edinburgh in 1886. The Holyrood Glass Company, with factory premises at the South Back of Canongate and a shop in central Edinburgh, was one of several celebrated glass making firms in Edinburgh. In 1868 it employed over 200 men and maintained mass production alongside higher end craft output, with a group of about 40 skilled engravers or glasscutters and apprentices. The owner of the company mid century, John Ford, who took over from an uncle, was apprentice trained as a glasscutter, making a cut glass fruit bowl as his apprenticeship piece. The company also maintained a strong relationship with a glass engraving workshop, J.H.B Millar, founded in the 1850s by a Bohemian entrepreneur with Bohemian workmen. J.H.B Millar was particularly associated with the development of the Scottish fern pattern design. This glass epergne represents a spectacular display of craftsmanship and ingenious design, with numerous cut glass elements in the eight separate bowls and on the upper section, which is topped with a glass replica of a crown and a Maltese cross. Richard Hunter, foreman glasscutter for the Holyrood Glass Company, made and probably also designed the piece, taking two years to complete it and bringing prestige and publicity for his employers in the process. The company was know for table pieces with a high craft input, including their specialist lines in cut glass lamps, some decorated with ceramic cameos and brass fixings. Other items were made for royal customers including a cut glass toilet service for Princess Beatrice in 1897, which was describe in the Edinburgh Evening News as intended for use at Balmoral but also on show at the company premises at 39 Princess Street Edinburgh for a few days prior to dispatch. But most of the company’s output and their main source of revenue were more prosaic and comprise mass produced glassware for the middle class home Image copyright Museum of Edinburgh Item Location Museum of Edinburgh Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Glass Epergne, Holyrood Flint Glass Company, ca.1841 apprentices Bohemia Brass ceramics Edinburgh engravers exhibitions fern pattern glass middle class Queen Victoria silver tableware https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/db2fb9b08387bcbb0cafd41aa7f2011a.jpg 371d2a279d47f515b8856f3f16ab8f88 Exhibition Item Title Glazed earthenware ornamental frog made by the Dunmore Pottery c. 1890 Category Glass and Ceramics Description This turquoise glazed earthenware flower vase, 175 mm high, is shaped as a Chinese grotesque three-legged lucky money frog, a traditional symbol of prosperity and wellbeing. The Dunmore Pottery made the ornament in a number of colours and in various sizes. An alternative version has the same frog in a seated position with its head raised and mouth open to hold flowers. The Dunmore Pottery made numerous animal-shaped vases and ornaments to suit Victorian taste. Some were of a naturalistic design, such as the much reproduced seated pig, which in more highly decorated form, was also famously made by the Wemyss factory in Fife by the firm of Robert Heron & Son. The owl was another popular subject and both the pig and the owl were produced in large numbers as moneyboxes. Oriental design was popular in the later nineteenth century as trade with the east expanded and the international exhibition movement exposed a wider audience to imports from China or Japan. The Dunmore Pottery near Airth in rural Stirlingshire was established in the late eighteenth century to take advantage of a seam of local clay that could be fashioned into domestic wares and tiles. Peter Gardener (1834-1919), who took over his father’s business in 1866, was a gifted designer and clever entrepreneur, adept at exploiting international exhibitions and aristocratic patronage to forward his reputation. The firm remained a small concern with only fifteen skilled potters at its peak in 1881. The Scotsman in 1886 highlighted Gardener’s ‘vases of artistic design, flower pots of various shapes and colours, garden seats and pedestals of lovely appearance, mantelpiece, table, and other useful and ornamental goods of excellent finish’. Dunmore pottery was sold through high-end shops throughout Britain and abroad. The company also had a specialist line in commemorative wares, mostly marking marriages or anniversaries. The Dunmore Pottery was well known for its vivid glazes, as in this example of bright turquoise. One of the best selling lines were the crackled red and turquoise glaze vases that caught the attention of Queen Victoria when first exhibited at the Edinburgh International Exhibition of 1886 and were subsequently named ‘Queen’s Vases’. Dunmore pottery was exhibited abroad as well as in Scotland, including the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876, but it was the Glasgow Exhibition of 1888 that saw the biggest and most spectacular display, with the ‘Lady Dunmore Bowl’ garnering much praise. The Dunmore Pottery success was partly founded on tourist sales, which was instrumental in the development of several types of Scottish craft production aimed at the souvenir market. There is a tourist guide to the pottery itself. The company closed in 1919 following Peter Gardner’s death. Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Glazed Earthenware Frog, the Dunmore Pottery, ca. 1890 aristocratic patronage ceramics China exhibitions Fife Oriental pottery Queen Victoria Stirlingshire tourist industry https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/af30322f9140413cd01f89cc36e0fd00.jpg 66ef9c40a95c97e975a515f5d37c819a Exhibition Item Category Glass and Ceramics Image copyright ©Falkirk Community Trust: Ref: P14070 Item Location Callendar House, Falkirk Description Production processes in Britain’s potteries were largely divided by gender until the twentieth-century. This is a portrait of a group of female workers at the Bridgeness Pottery in Bo’Ness near Falkirk. On the board in front of the group is chalked the words 'Bridgeness Pottery Spongers', showing them to be the young women responsible for hand decorating domestic ware in the pottery’s sponging department. The Bridgeness Pottery was founded by C.W.McNay in 1888 and operated in the Bo’Ness area until 1958. Spongeware is the term used to describe pottery decorated by applying colour using a piece of natural sponge. It is widely considered to be a Scottish technique that was first used in the 1830s and then put into commercial production a decade later by Staffordshire potter William Adams. Sponging was an economic means of producing simple, two-dimensional patterns in one or two colours on inexpensive pots. The women in the photograph would have used carved pieces of natural sponge to apply repeat patterns to the unglazed pottery (biscuit-ware) before firing. Popular spongeware patterns included flowers, animals, ornamental lozenges and borders. Female workers were nearly always employed at the finishing end of production where they decorated wares using a variety of techniques. Hand-painting and gilding demanded specialist training at an art-school, whereas applying transfer designs and sponging were techniques learned on the job. Nevertheless sponging required a coordination of hand and eye and a sense of design as described by Margaret Finlay who worked in the sponging department at the Bridgeness Pottery from 1916 to the 1927. She described the process of sponging as part of a working day that started and 6 o’clock in the morning and finished at 6 o’clock at night: “I was in the Sponging and you had a wheel… you worked it with this hand and you did your sponging with this one and you had an arm rest and you could do your colourings with the plates for the different colour stuffs you had. You had a bit of sponge in every one of these things…Every time you worked it you turned the wheel round with your fingers underneath and you turned it round and got the pattern on. If you were going to put lines round plates or anything, you had a wee brush, long to a point… and when you turned the wheel round this was going all the time and your hand was making a line round it.” (http://bonesspottery.co.uk/fim.html) Bridgeness was just one of a number of potteries operating in Bo’Ness in the nineteenth century with six different works operating out of the district between 1766 and 1958. The McNay family were also partners in the Bo’Ness Pottery (est.1784), which went into liquidation in 1898 transferring its trade in transfer-printed goods for Empire markets along with machinery and copper-plates to the Bridgeness works. Nevertheless, emphasis at the Bridgeness Pottery remained on serviceable goods in the form of functional sponge-decorated household pottery rather than luxury productions. In a dinner to mark the opening of the pottery, the founder C.W.McNay described its activities as not ‘attempting to do what the great potteries in England did, who could get large sums for making a single pot’ but instead competing ‘with the best of them in producing the more common article… broken day after day to the grief of all housewives’ (Falkirk Herald, April 21,1888). Perhaps for this reason very few examples of Bridgeness Pottery spongeware have survived. But the technique was used widely in Scottish potteries and surviving examples have been accredited to potteries in Kirkcaldy, Glasgow and Prestonpans Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Bridgeness Pottery Spongers, ca.1910 Bo-ness ceramics decorators design design schools Falkirk pottery women craftworkers women’s industries https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/c21567c3750a55628242ab44ed3793b2.jpg d8948901640f25041f3a8b45afc23af4 Exhibition Item Category Buildings Image copyright Courtesy of Dumfries Museum © Dumfries & Galloway Council Item Location Sanquhar Tolbooth Museum Description This pavement tile was made at James Brodie’s brick and tile works in Sanquhar, Dumfriesshire. It has a geometric surface pattern comprising two wheels of raised clay with indents designed to channel water away from the centre of the tile. A ‘blue’ version coloured with the iron oxide found in local carboniferous coal measures has also survived in Dumfriesshire Museum’s collections. Paving tiles were a niche area of production of the Scottish brick-making industry which, according to Bremner’s, The Industries of Scotland, employed in excess of 4000 people across 122 manufactories in the late 1860s. Sanquhar’s potteries developed from its coal-mining industry, which was founded in 1792 when the Duke of Queensbury began to exploit the coalfields on his estate. The red marls and clays that lay on the upper part of the shallow coal measures to the north of Sanquhar provided a ready source of natural materials for brickmaking, and the character of Sanquhar’s clay made it particularly suitable for making the hardest and most durable type of brick. Trends in agriculture from mid-century set a demand for specialist drainage bricks that became a key area of the industry, including at Sanquhar where Brodie’s brick and tile manufactory had opened in 1852 under the management of George Cleunel. Bricks and tiles were made by forming clay into wooden moulds shaped to include indentations (‘frogs’) to economise on clay, or by impressing patterns into the surface of pre-moulded bricks. Pressed bricks had increased density that made them heavier and more enduring. When pressed with a raised pattern they provided a decorative and functional surface. Various steam-driven machinery was introduced to streamline the brickmaking process from the 1810s but even large manufactories were dependent on men to oversee the pressing technologies. In 1901 there were 90 men listed in Sanquhar as specialist brickmakers (‘Dumfriesshire’ Cambridge County Geography, 1912). James Brodie became tenant of the works in 1889 and extended its capabilities to include five Newcastle (barrel-shaped) kilns and a Staffordshire Oven, both particularly suitable for firing outdoor bricks and tiles. The functional nature of Brodie’s tiles made them products suited to the landscape of industrial Scotland. An entry in the 1903 Glasgow Post Office Directory describes the business as ‘Brodie, Jas. Ltd, Sanquhar, supplier off red terra-cotta and blue metallic bricks and tiles’, and notes that Brodie sold his goods through an agent, ‘John Ferguson, at 150 Sinclair Drive, Langside, Glasgow’. Terracotta was much used in architectural works from the mid-nineteenth century. Another Scottish firm, Messrs Alexander Wilson & Son of Dunfermline, supplied much of the terracotta used in the construction of buildings at South Kensington in London in the 1860s. Decorative pavement tiles shed surface water quickly so were a practical choice for external areas such as stables and canal paths where surface grip was essential. Paving tiles with simple raised grids and diamonds have also been attributed to the Sanquhar works whilst it was under the management of Brodie. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pavement tile made at the Sanquhar tile works, ca. 1890 agriculture ceramics Glasgow Sanquhar terracotta tools