It wasn’t as if some government agency had written a position paper on post Revolution cultural development – although many individuals did. Americans believed their arts would flourish once freed from English tyranny. People were thus urged to favor fancy over purely utilitarian goods. (“Fancy” meaning an intelligent stimulus toward creative thinking.)
But there’s a funny thing about mercantile capitalism. Phrases like “fancy goods” are quickly co-opted by bald-faced mass marketing. The disappointment of such people as Charles Wilson Peale and Noah Webster was visceral when events turned out differently than expected.
There was probably no clearer, nor more ironic, example of this situation than the trajectory of the Rockingham glaze.
“Rockingham” originally described a rich chocolate brown glaze made on the Marquis of Rockingham’s Swinton estate in Yorkshire, England beginning in 1757. When the Swinton pottery failed in 1842 the glaze went (quite successfully) to potteries in Derbyshire. It also went with hordes of emigrating potters to America.
American potters – mostly English émigrés freed from the conventions of their homeland – lost no time in transforming Rockingham into a dripped, splattered, sponged, polychrome marvel. Pottery from Bennington VT to East Liverpool OH was slathered with it. Within three years of it’s introduction to these shores, Rockingham by James Bennett of Pittsburg PA won the 1845 Franklin Institute pottery diploma. Trenton NJ was an epicenter of production, with (émigré) Daniel Greatbatch as perhaps Rockingham’s best practitioner.
Christopher Webber Fenton hoped to mimic Josiah Wedgwood’s nomenclature genius by calling Rockingham he made at the Norton Pottery “Flint Enamel.” Local potters called Fenton’s nomenclature “humbug.” Others called Rockingham “Variegated Ware,” “Fancy Ware,” or simply “Rock.”
A discerning eye looking at Rockingham’s finest examples becomes lost in the depths of flowing, layered colors. At the risk of hyperbole (a common 19th century trait), one could almost see it as a genuine American T’ang glaze.
But most of the tonnage of 19th century Rockingham was quite gaudy. Therein lay Rockingham’s down side. The glaze’s overpowering nature could make anything look “fancy.” So much so that in 1901, years after Rockingham’s craze had run it’s course, James Carr sighed while recounting what might have been a common exchange between pottery owner and shop worker:
“…roughness was the order of the day, and if I made a complaint the answer was: ‘Well boss, Rock will cover it.’”
Readings
Fancy Rockingham Pottery: The Modeller and Ceramics in Nineteenth Century America. Diana Stradling. University of Richmond Museum/Richmond, VA. 2004.
After The Revolution. Joseph Ellis. W.W. Norton/New York. 1979.
The Art of the Potter. Diana and J. Garrison Stradling. Main Street-Universe Books/New York. 1977.
Early New England Potters and Their Wares. Lura Woodside Watkins. Harvard Univ Press/Cambridge MA. 1968.
This Day in Pottery History 