Antique Newcastle Prattware Pottery Horse Figure, English Folk Art Attributed to St. Anthony’s Pottery, Newcastle Upon Tyne

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Description

Antique Newcastle Prattware Pottery Horse Figure, English Folk Art
Attributed to St. Anthony’s Pottery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Circa 1820

This … Read more Antique Newcastle Prattware Pottery Horse Figure, English Folk Art
Attributed to St. Anthony’s Pottery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Circa 1820

This charming early nineteenth-century Prattware horse exemplifies the folk art tradition of northeastern England’s pottery production. Modeled with an unusually long, full tail, the horse stands four-square on a flat, shaped rectangular base with incurved sides, washed in copper green. Its pale body is sponged with dense manganese-brown dappling that reads as a dapple-gray coat, while the combed mane, forelock, and tail are painted a glossy dark brown and the hooves are picked out to match. A painted bridle frames the head, and the reins hang in a loop against the shoulder. A blue saddlecloth bordered in yellow ochre lies across the back, secured by an orange-ochre surcingle encircling the middle, the whole palette achieved with underglaze high-temperature metallic-oxide pigments painted on the biscuit before glazing.

At just over six inches high, the horse suits a bookcase shelf, a library table, or a mantel grouping with other early English pottery animals, and it sits naturally within an equestrian or English country-house scheme.

Dimensions
Height: 6¼ inches (15.9 cm)
Length: 6¾ inches (17.1 cm)
Depth: 2 inches (5.1 cm)

Marks
Inscribed to the base (partially obscured): “H. Hanland 1823... From his Grandma K..” The horse bears no factory mark; some horses of this form bear an impressed “St Anthony” mark to the base, which is the basis of the Newcastle attribution.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

References
John and Griselda Lewis, Pratt Ware: English and Scottish Relief Decorated and Underglaze Coloured Earthenware 1780–1840 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1984), p. 100, illustrating a similar marked model from St. Anthony’s Pottery.
Clarice and Harold Blakey, eds., St. Anthony’s Pottery, Newcastle upon Tyne: Joseph Sewell’s Book of Designs (Northern Ceramic Society and Tyne & Wear Museums, 1993).
Llewellynn Jewitt, The Ceramic Art of Great Britain, vol. 2 (London, 1878), St. Anthony’s Pottery.

Historical Context
St. Anthony’s Pottery stood on the north bank of the Tyne a few miles east of Newcastle and was established about 1780. Joseph Sewell (c. 1777–1858) had taken it over by 1804 and enlarged it in 1814–15 to manufacture chiefly for export, shipping cream-colored and printed wares to Holland, Denmark, and other Continental markets; the firm traded as Sewell & Donkin from 1819 and later as Sewell & Co., and the works closed in 1878. The name Prattware derives from relief-molded jugs impressed PRATT, associated with the Pratt family of Lane Delph (later Fenton), Staffordshire, but it is used generically for earthenwares decorated in the same palette of underglaze oxide colors — ochre and orange-ochre, cobalt blue, copper green, and manganese brown — made in Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Liverpool, Sunderland, Tyneside, and Scotland.

Horse models were particularly popular, reflecting the animal’s central role in early nineteenth-century transportation, agriculture, and industry. The 1823 inscription on this example, recording a gift from a grandmother, provides rare documentary evidence of early ownership and of the sentimental value these pieces held for their first owners.

Ref: NY8680B-nurr See less