Antique Majolica Arsenal Pottery Yellow Bamboo Sunflower Flower Pitcher 5"

Description

Antique Arsenal Pottery creamer pitcher or jug featuring a yellow bamboo design with sunflower / daisy and dogwood flowers flanking a rope twist handle.

Arsenal Pottery
The Arsenal Pottery was founded in 1876 by Joseph S. Mayer (1846–1907), an English-born-and-trained potter and inventor, as well as a consummate salesman. Initially, the firm produced other types of earthenware, specifically the mottled-brown ware known as Rockingham as well as yellow-bodied ware, or yellowware. By 1882, following the arrival of Mayer’s older brother James (1841–1883), who had a “chemical knowledge of colors” that he applied to the formulation of glazes, the pottery had begun to make majolica.

As a high-volume producer of low-cost wares, Mayer employed a strategy aimed at making majolica accessible to the masses—an approach that made him, at one time, a very wealthy man and an important figure in the ceramic history of Trenton. The plates and jugs that his firm produced are the kinds of decorative wares that adorned the parlors and dining tables of middle- and working-class Americans in the 1880s and 1890s. The plant and animal motifs are suggestive of the nineteenth-century notion that proximity to nature, whether real or manufactured, would make the home a healthy, nurturing environment. Most of these designs were available in a range of color combinations, further expanding Arsenal Pottery’s majolica offerings, which the firm produced well into the 1890s.

Joseph S. Mayer’s motto “everybody wants a jug” reflects the Arsenal Pottery’s commercial strategy to satisfy market demand through the manufacture of low-cost goods at high volume. Many of the firm’s majolica wares were copies of models made by well-known English manufacturers, including its Tea Jug and Marine Jug, which were derived from prototypes introduced by Josiah Wedgwood & Sons and Wardle & Co., respectively.

Condition

Good Overall - wear/crazing

Dimensions

4" x 3" x 5" (Width x Depth x Height)