Wemyss Ware Cat, ca. 1890

This ceramic cat has glass eyes and is decorated all over with yellow glaze and a pattern of blue hearts and roundels.  It was made as part of the Wemyss Ware range at Robert Heron & Son, Kirkcaldy, though its characterful stance and distinctive decoration shares characteristics with ceramic cats made by Emile Galle of Paris in the 1870s. Wemyss Ware was particular to Heron’s Fife Pottery where it was introduced as a hand-decorated range in around 1882. 

Robert Heron was the last of three generations of the Methven family to run Kirkcaldy’s potteries.  David Methven bought the works and clay rights to the Links Pottery in Kirkcaldy in 1776 and his son John bought the nearby Fife Pottery in 1827.  It was this pottery that Robert Heron inherited from his mother Mary Methven Heron in 1887. Under his influence and with the painting skills of decorators brought specially from Bohemia, a clearly identifiable, hand-painted style was created for the wares produced at the Fife Pottery.  An early advertisement described Wemyss Ware as “The Original Hand-Painted Pottery in Flowers, Fruits, Cocks and Hens”.  This cat is a typical example of late nineteenth century decorative design that used vibrant oriental-style colours.

Wemyss Ware was named for the Wemyss family at the local Wemyss Castle, and its early shapes were informed by the ceramic antiquities held in the family’s collection.  Two Fife Pottery vases, the ‘Lady Eva’ and the ‘Grosvenor’, were named after family members. Aristocratic patronage remained significant in helping Wemyss Ware to become a staple of Edwardian country house furnishing, and goods were displayed by arrangement at local fund-raising bazaars or in a special room at the pottery itself to coincide with visits from dignitaries and Wemyss family relations. Wemyss Ware was also sold in London through the pottery warehouse, T Goode & Co of South Audley Street, who had selling rights in England. A cat very similar to this one has been found impressed with ‘Wemyss Ware, R.H & S’ and stamped with ‘T Goode & Co’s insignia.

Ceramic animals, sometimes more commonly associated with the Staffordshire potteries, were a favourite form of parlour ornament in the late nineteenth century with pairs of Wally Dugs, as they were known in Scotland, or ceramic cats being a familiar sight on a middle-class mantlepiece. Each figurine was hand-painted giving individual characteristics to faces and features. The ubiquity of pairs of dogs made them something of a Victorian cliché though cats made at reputable potteries remain highly collectable. Plain and floral Wemyss Ware cats are still made at the Griselda Hill Pottery.

Scotland’s rich resources of natural red clay made it home to numerous potteries but production of decorative china like Wemyss Ware was dependent on the availability of fine, white clays that could only be sourced from Cornwall, Devon and Dorset.  In an exchange of essential resources, cargoes of china and ball clay from England’s south-western counties were exchanged for Scottish coal that was shipped to England for use in its own manufacturing industries.