Years ago RR inherited a tall ceramic umbrella stand shattered in a recent wildfire. She discovered two shards that, when put together like puzzle pieces, read RN 288102 and RN 284106. A trace of a word is above these marks, “Melbou-” possibly for Melbourne, more than likely the pattern name. With these two shards and RR’s sketch, she asked for an estimated value.
The ‘RN’ (Registered Number) refers to the British practice of registering ceramics from the mid-19th to early 20th century. You often find these marks inside a cryptic diamond with letters and numbers in all four corners. In the very late 19th century they retired the diamond shape, and the registration number became a single line or two. Two if both the design and shape were registered separately.
Know the Number, Know the Date
British pottery was registered from 1839–1964 and entered into massive books. Those unwieldy volumes contained number, owner of the design, and quantity made. They are held at the National Archives at Kew, Richmond, Surrey. If you know the number, you know the date.
The number on RR’s vessel indicates its date of creation as 1896–97. This date is a clue to its style, along with RR’s sketch of the shape of the vessel, a tapered trumpet shape with a flared rim. We associated this style with Japanese porcelain. A tiny portion of the remaining shards show a design of blue, and blue and white ceramics seemed prevalent in late 19th century England.
The vessel shape, reminiscent of Japanese porcelain, was likely designed during the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement. The Aesthetic Movement, an era of design colored by Japanese shapes, patterns, and symbols, imitated Japanese forms of porcelain. They painted those forms with sunflowers, prunus blossoms, chrysanthemums, magnolias, hawthorn buds, and exotic birds, such as the peacock.
Japan “opened” after 200 years of isolation by the American Commodore Perry in 1853. Perry sailed his four steel ships into the harbor at Tokyo Bay, seeking to reinvigorate trade between Japan and the Western world. By 1870 Japanese woodcuts entered the drawing rooms of many fashionable collectors, along with significant Japanese porcelain and furniture. British designers co-opted Japanese shapes and designs into traditional British ceramic objects, such as RR’s umbrella stand.
Aesthetic Movement
Both Britain and the U.S. produced Aesthetic Movement design, rooted in Asian aesthetics in the late 19th century. Japan experienced the West’s colonization, expansionism, capitalism, and nationalism.
The shards indicate the type of ceramic medium, a salt glazed stoneware with a thick glaze. Vaporizing common salt in the fire of the kiln produces this distinctive glaze. The sodium reacts with the silicates of the stoneware to produce a non-porous glaze. Earliest examples of salt glazed stoneware date to 14th century Germany.
Doulton and Co. created the most popular of all salt glazed stoneware in the Aesthetic Movement together with the Lambert School of Art, a liaison begun in 1863. Students and designers became acclaimed for their ceramics at major International Exhibitions such as the Philadelphia World’s Fair of 1886 and the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Doulton’s Lambeth and Burslem wares became so popular the Doulton factory employed 370 shapers and designers from late 1890s to Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. Her death ushered in a new generation of designers, who moved away from the Aesthetic tradition.
End of a Movement
The Aesthetic Movement spanned decorative art and literature as an elitist movement of “art for art’s sake” from 1870s to 1901. Two giants of the style, one in art, one in literature, were the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s trial for alleged homosexual acts in 1895 marked the beginning of the end of the Aesthetic Movement. Wilde said, “I find it hard to live up to my blue and white porcelain.’’ He found it difficult to live a life dedicated to beauty in such as world as ours. Aesthetes like Wilde belonged to the educated monied upper class. They believed objects seen daily should be beautiful, need not serve a utilitarian purpose.
I assume RR’s umbrella stand was created 1896-7, of salt glazed stoneware designed in the Doulton factory in conjunction with the Lamberth School of Art. If those assumptions are correct, the value of the piece was $800-$1,200.