Tin-glazed pottery

The makers of Italian tin-glazed pottery from the late Renaissance blended oxides to produce detailed and realistic polychrome paintings.

The earliest tin-glazed pottery appears to have been made in Iraq in the 9th century,[2] the oldest fragments having been excavated during the First World War from the palace of Samarra about fifty miles north of Baghdad.

The word maiolica is thought to have come from the medieval Italian word for Majorca, an island on the route for ships that brought Hispano-Moresque wares to Italy from Valencia in the 15th and 16th centuries, or from the Spanish obra de Mallequa, the term for lustered ware made in Valencia under the influence of Moorish craftsmen from Malaga.

During the Renaissance, the term maiolica was adopted for Italian-made luster pottery copying Spanish examples, and, during the 16th century, its meaning shifted to include all tin-glazed earthenware.

Because of their identical names, there has been some confusion between tin-glazed majolica/maiolica and the lead-glazed majolica made in England and America in the 19th century, but they are different in origin, technique, style and history.

Honey (Keeper of Ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1938–1950) wrote of maiolica that, "By a convenient extension and limitation the name may be applied to all tin-glazed ware, of whatever nationality, made in the Italian tradition … the name faïence (or the synonymous English 'delftware') being reserved for the later wares of the 17th Century onwards, either in original styles (as in the case of the French) or, more frequently, in the Dutch-Chinese (Delft) tradition.

Hispano-Moresque ware is generally distinguished from the pottery of Christendom by the Islamic character of its decoration,[3] though as the dish illustrated shows, it was also made for the Christian market.

Hispano-Moresque shapes of the 15th century included the albarello (a tall jar), luster dishes with coats of arms, made for wealthy Italians and Spaniards, jugs, some on high feet (the citra and the grealet), a deep-sided dish (the lebrillo de alo) and the eared bowl (cuenco de oreja).

[10] During the later 14th century, the limited palette of colors was expanded from the traditional manganese purple and copper green to embrace cobalt blue, antimony yellow and iron-oxide orange.

Italian cities encouraged the start of a new pottery industry by offering tax relief, citizenship, monopoly rights and protection from outside imports.

[3] Much of the finer work was produced in Delft, but simple everyday tin-glazed pottery was made in such places as Gouda, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Dordrecht.

[3] Although Dutch potters did not immediately imitate Chinese porcelain, they began to do after the death of the Emperor Wan-Li in 1619, when the supply to Europe was interrupted.

John Stow's Survey of London (1598) records the arrival in 1567 of two Antwerp potters, Jasper Andries and Jacob Jansen, in Norwich, where they made "Gally Paving Tiles, and vessels for Apothecaries and others, very artificially".

[3] In 1579 Jansen applied to Queen Elizabeth I for the sole right to practice "galleypotting" (at the time "galliware" was the term in English for delftware) in London and soon set up a workshop at Aldgate to the east of the city.

Blue-dash chargers, usually between about 25 and 35 cm in diameter with abstract, floral, religious, patriotic or topographical[permanent dead link‍] motifs, were produced in quantity by London and Bristol potters until the early 18th century.

Smaller and more everyday wares were also made: paving tiles, mugs, drug jars, dishes, wine bottles, posset pots, salt pots, candlesticks, fuddling cups,[16] puzzle jugs,[17] barber's bowls, pill slabs, bleeding bowls, porringers, and flower bricks.

Apothecary wares, including albarelli, can bear the names of their intended contents, generally in Latin and often so abbreviated to be unrecognizable to the untutored eye.

At the same time a commercial treaty with Britain in 1786 led to a flood of imports of English creamware which was not only superior to faience in terms of weight and strength, but cheaper.

[21] Otherwise, tin oxide in glazes, often in conjunction with zircon compounds, is generally restricted to specialist low temperature applications and use by studio potters.

[19][22] In England at the end of the nineteenth century, William De Morgan re-discovered the technique of firing luster on tin-glaze "to an extraordinarily high standard".

[23] Since the beginning of the 20th century there has been a revival of pottery-making in Orvieto and Deruta, the traditional centres of tin-glazed ceramics in Italy, where the shapes and designs of the medieval and renaissance period are reproduced.

At the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, Dora Billington encouraged her students, including William Newland and Alan Caiger-Smith, to use tin-glaze decoration.