This illustrated history tells the story of the small Mortlake pottery producing brown salt-glaze stoneware products established by Joseph Kishere in the late 18th century and links this to the larger potworks founded by the Lambeth potter John Saunders 50 years earlier, also in Mortlake and where Kishere served his apprenticeship.
Chapters cover the origins of the Mortlake pottery together with a study of Kishere stonewares and its state of flux after the expansion of the Staffordshire potteries. This followed the perfection of Josiah Wedgwood’s cream coloured earthenware which had partially eroded the market for stoneware beer mugs, which, along with the more expensive and stealable pewter, was much favoured in the country’s taverns.
The rise of a niche market saw the small family-run pottery making attractive, decorated, modestly priced stonewares. With appeal to the London and the country markets, it combining the virtues of tough stoneware with good potting, smooth clay and a brilliant glaze with a range of neoclassical motifs pinched from industrial creamwares and white stonewares. This, combined with a nostalgic reaction by beer drinkers against white beer mugs and a rallying cry which linked ale and brown stoneware saw the relaunch and the updating of an old product and also the birth of the Mortlake stoneware hunting jugs cleverly catering for the British love of rural sports.
Tale of a family-run pottery making sales from chasing ales
Joseph Kishere and the Mortlake Potteries by Jack Howarth and Robin Hildyard, published by the Antique Collectors’ Club, ISBN 1851494626, £25hb. THE only published history of the Mortlake potteries has been a 12-page booklet written by John Eustace Anderson more than 100 years ago. Now, the V&A’s Robin Hildyard has expanded and extended the potteries’ story following much family research by Jack Howarth.
