A Staffordshire or Yorkshire slipware clockface dish, circa 1715

Footnotes

Exhibited:
The Merchant's House, Marlborough, Wiltshire, 2011-2018

This is one of three moulded designs recorded on English slipware dishes featuring clock faces. The others include the celebrated version by Samuel Malkin, of which two examples are known. One was presented to the British Museum by Ernest Allman, and the other was formerly in the Rous Lench and Longridge Collections and is illustrated by Leslie B. Grigsby, the Longridge Collection of English Slipware and Delftware (2000), fig.S11. Both examples are signed in the mould 'Sam. Malkin The maker in burslam'. The Longridge dish also bears a moulded inscription 'The Christians dyal or a Cheap Watch for a poor Man' and is dated 1712. Fragments bearing this inscription were found in excavations at Massey Square in Burslem, close to the Malkin family pottery. The other clock face design is known from a single example also formerly belonging to Ernest Allman and now at Williamsburg, illustrated by Ronald Cooper, English Slipware Dishes (1968), pl. 266. This shows a full dial coloured in the same manner as the present lot and is inscribed with initials 'IC'. In all of these dishes the clock hands point to midnight, perhaps as a memento mori.

Moulded slipware dishes probably originated in Burslem where Samuel Malkin was the leading exponent. Excavations and recent research has found that the technique was adopted in other parts of the country, including Whitehaven in Cumbria and at Leeds, Midhope and Halifax in Yorkshire.