Product Details

SPECS: Rimmed soup bowl, approx 8 1/2 -9 in diameter. Black transfer print on white earthenware. Wide rim packed with full-blown roses and foliage, beaded inner and outer edges, deep well with the river scene at center. Backstamp: printed oval garter mark reading SEWELL & CO NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE around WILD ROSE. HISTORY: Wild Rose is one of the great English transfer patterns, and the scene is a real place - the Thames at Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire, seat of the Earl Harcourt, with grounds laid out by Capability Brown around 1780. The bridge, the church tower on the hill, the punt and the figures in the skiff are all part of the engraved view. Dozens of potteries printed versions of Wild Rose, which is exactly why a marked example matters. This one came out of St Anthony's Pottery at Newcastle upon Tyne, run by the Sewell family from 1804 until the works closed in 1878 - trading as Sewell & Donkin from 1821 and as Sewell & Co from 1853. Tyneside, not Staffordshire, and not German whatever anyone may have told you along the way. Black sits at the rare end of the transfer color scale, well past blue, brown, green, pink and red. DATE: c.1853-1878. The SEWELL & CO partnership name dates from 1853 and the pottery closed in 1878, so the printed mark brackets this piece inside a twenty-five-year window. Confirmed antique, 145-plus years old.