XIII

LIVERPOOL WARE

It is the hope of the writer of these “Chats” that Worcester and Derby, Bristol and Plymouth, Bow and Chelsea have become something more than mere names to the readers who have followed our journeyings. The china-shelf has been shown to hold the monuments of men’s lives. Behind the delicate pencillings and the shower of rose-leaves lies many a tragic story. Liverpool and its ware is not the least of the great landmarks in the history of English ceramic art.

In entering on the threshold of the history of Liverpool, and of the printed ware stated to have been first produced there, we find ourselves in the midst of a controversy. If discussions upon points of china-collecting were waged physically, the opponents in their heat would have demolished each other long ago with their own china collections, but luckily, they have confined themselves to hurling opinions and nothing more tangible. Philosophically, they have agreed to differ, and have parted good friends, to renew the argument another day, or they have each gone to his last home and the echoes of the conflict have come down to us, and fresh battles are fought over the theories of dead collectors. Up till quite recently a wordy war was being waged over Lowestoft, and the laurels of that much-disputed factory were in great danger of being snatched away.

To John Sadler, of Liverpool, is generally ascribed the honour of having discovered the useful art of printing on pottery from copper-plate engravings. He was the son of Adam Sadler, a printer, in Liverpool, who had formerly served as a soldier under the Duke of Marlborough in the wars in the Low Countries. John Sadler carried on the business of an engraver in Harrington Street, and having noticed that some of his waste prints were used by children to stick on to fragments of earthenware obtained from the potteries, he commenced experiments with a view of extending this application to the purposes of decoration.

He associated himself about the year 1750 with Guy Green, who had succeeded to the printing business of Adam Sadler.

The secret of the manner in which an engraving was transferred from a copper-plate to the rounded surface of a bowl or a teapot, was well kept, but it was fairly obvious that in some way or another the design was transferred to paper and then retransferred to the china object to be decorated.

Sadler and Green, after working at the discovery, applied for a patent. The value of the invention can best be understood by the following affidavit made by John Sadler and Guy Green, in 1756.

“I, John Sadler, of Liverpoole, in the county of Lancaster, printer, and Guy Green, of Liverpoole aforesaid, printer, severally maketh oath, that on Tuesday, the 27th July, inst., they, these deponents, without the aid or assistance of any other person or persons, did, within the space of six hours, to wit, betwixt the hours of nine in the morning and three in the afternoon of the same day, print upwards of 1,200 earthenware tiles of different patterns, at Liverpoole aforesaid, and which, as these deponents have heard and believe, were more in number, and better, and neater than 100 skilful pot painters could have painted in the like space of time in the common and usual way of painting with a pencil; and these deponents say that they have been upwards of seven years in finding out the method of printing tiles, and in making tryals and experiments for that purpose, which they have now, through great pains and expense, brought to perfection.”

Two printers doing the work of a hundred tile painters! The stupendous nature of the invention is seen in the light of this statement. Caxton never made a greater discovery when he set his type moving, and the illuminated manuscripts of the monks became the printed page in the hands of the common people. Josiah Wedgwood, with characteristic foresight, saw the value of the work of Sadler and Green, and his waggons made weekly journeys from Staffordshire up to Liverpool laden with his Queen’s ware to be decorated in the new style.

To come back to the controversy for a moment, it is claimed that Worcester was first to produce printed china. There is at the Bethnal Green Museum a printed mug of Worcester, dated 1757. It will be remembered that the date of Sadler and Green’s affidavit was 1756. But a claim is made for a third factory—Battersea. There is a letter from Horace Walpole to Bentley, dated 1755, in which he says: “I shall send you, too, a trifling snuff-box, only as a sample of the new manufacture of Battersea, which is done from copper-plates.” There are also dated pieces of this Battersea enamel with the design printed upon them, dated as early as 1753 and 1754. In all probability Worcester derived the secret from Battersea, as Robert Hancock, of Worcester fame, who signed some of the older pieces, was formerly an engraver at Battersea.

In spite of this fact there is every reason for believing that at Liverpool, Sadler and Green independently discovered the art of printing on china, as their affidavit declares them to have been engaged upon it for seven years, which takes them back to 1749.

Of the earlier potters of Liverpool, we have little space to deal in this “Chat.” Chaffers, a contemporary of Josiah Wedgwood, and a formidable rival of the Staffordshire potter; Thomas and Samuel Shaw; John Pennington, celebrated for his punch-bowls and for a very fine blue ware, are all well known to collectors of Liverpool ware. We give the marks of these factories, and of other Liverpool makers: Philip Christian (1760-1775), W. Reid & Co. (1756-1760), Herculaneum Pottery (1790-1841). Staffordshire had its Etruria and Lancashire its Herculaneum. In the earlier days of the potter classic names were much in vogue. A favourite pattern in Herculaneum china was a series of the towns of England printed on the pieces, with the name in a medallion at the bottom of the piece. The bird is the liver, being the crest of the city of Liverpool, and was used at Herculaneum by Messrs. Case, Mort & Co. in 1833. The anchor mark is between this date and 1841, when the factory ceased.

When it is remembered that Wedgwood had his ware printed by Sadler and Green and that Bow sent to Liverpool to have the Liverpool designs transferred to the Bow china, it is easy to understand how complicated it becomes to determine with exactitude how little or how much was actually printed at Liverpool, because there came a time when the secret leaked out and when other factories besides Liverpool and Worcester began to print their own wares.

We reproduce a Liverpool mug, printed in brownish red colour, representing a lover and his lass. It is typically English in treatment and design, and it is this quality which makes Liverpool printed ware so interesting. There is nothing like it in any of the Continental wares. The quaint and delicate English pastoral scene breathes of the eighteenth century. The refrain might run:—

Or take the old Liverpool jug with the landscape printed in black on one side, and the humorous heads, entitled “Courtship and Matrimony,” on the other; which heads, by the way, will our readers kindly turn upside down to gather what the acid doggerel written underneath alludes to. It is a pity the jug is not perfect, but the top has a metal band which remedies the broken spout. The lines underneath the heads run:—

We reproduce as a headpiece two exquisitely black printed Liverpool tiles. It is true they are badly damaged, but their quaint designs were worth the preserving. The one with the gallant sportsman firing at a deer at very close range is queerly out of perspective. The other tile is a typically English rural scene, and pity it is that more of our rustic scenery has not found its way to our national china.

Another of our illustrations is that of a Liverpool mug with subject entitled “The Tithe Pig,” in which the vicar appears to have come off worst in a wordy encounter with two of his parishioners. There is a grim humour about many of the eighteenth-century decorated mugs and jugs which are a record in ceramics of party strifes and of long-forgotten social enmities.

It will be seen that the Liverpool printed ware has in it an element of decoration which some of the other wares do not possess. Many of our readers doubtless possess specimens of this black or brown printed ware, mugs, or tiles, or teapots with old-world scenes upon them like the landscapes of our illustration. Shepherds and herds, fifers and fiddlers and dancers, village-green sports, lads and lasses “dancing the hays”—these are the homely scenes transferred from the old copper-plates.