This monumental 2ft 2in (65cm) high and documentary Staffordshire blue and white transfer printed jug sold for $4800 (£4000) as part of Bonhams Skinner’s sale of British pottery and porcelain. It came from the estate of a well-known transferware collector.
Standing 2ft 2in (65cm) high, it is printed with a series of European-style landscapes and floral borders and is inscribed below the spout Charles Floyd Earthenware & China Dealer London 1835. It was probably made as a shop display piece.
Relatively little is known about Floyd although this particular jug – pictured in Pottery and Porcelain 1700- 1914 by Bevis Hillier (1968) – does receive a mention in the online directory of ‘chinamen’ compiled by Robin Hildyard that is available to view on the Northern Ceramics Society website.
Selling well above the $600-800 estimate by the time bidding closed on December 20 (the price with the 27.5% buyer’s premium added was $6120), it was the most eagerly-contested lot in the first tranche of wares from the collection of Flora Rabinovitch.
A resident of Seattle who died in April last year, her vast holdings of more than 1000 pieces of Staffordshire blue and white were well known to members of the Transferware Collectors Club.
A detail of the Staffordshire blue and white transfer printed jug dated 1835 – $4800 (£4000) at Bonhams Skinner.
Her daughter Ellen wrote: “The act of collecting has been described by many as a disease. And my mother would often say ‘I’ve got it bad’. Mother was not tech savvy so it was in her large transfer-printed pitchers and foot baths that she sorted her papers – bills in one foot bath, receipts in another and miscellaneous papers in a large jug.”
Flora’s husband, the chemistry professor Seymour Rabinovitch (1919-2014), was also a collector of British antiques: an honorary member of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, his antique silver servers were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2005.
