PICTURESQUE SENTIMENTS
In addition to tablewares and figures, the Derby porcelain manufactory specialised in sets of vases, or garnitures, for the chimneypiece in the fashionable neoclassical taste. A typical example is this three-piece garniture of 1784–5, now at Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland.
The manufactory had at least 100 di erent vase shapes in production when this set was made, each identified by a model number, which is often, as here, incised on the base. The central vase was shape ‘ No 100’, the flanking vases, ‘ No 98’.
Listed in the 1779 Chelsea- Derby auction catalogue as ‘Ewer Form’d Vases’, they have been known as ‘Kedleston ewers’ since 1878. The oval reserves of the Seaton Delaval vases are painted in monochrome grey-brown enamels, perhaps the ‘grey enamel’ or the ‘pure Self colour’ recorded in 1783 and 1785 auction catalogues. Their principal subjects include a shepherd with a lamb, perhaps representing liberty; a girl with a caged bird, symbolising matrimony; and widowhood, based on a red stipple engraving by William Wynn Ryland after Angelica Kau man depicting the Widow Maria, a character in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.
The imaginary landscapes on the reverse, possibly painted by Zachariah
Boreman, reflect the rise of picturesque tourism in Britain in the 1780s, and the appreciation of natural scenery evident, for example, in William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye and monochrome aquatints after Paul Sandby.
Sir John Hussey Delaval, 1st Baron Delaval, of Seaton Delaval, was a buyer at the Derby manufactory’s auction held by Christie and Ansell on 5th May 1779. He also recorded in his account book, on 5th March 1786, payment for ‘China figures £2.12.0’, dozens of which are listed in a 1788 inventory of his London house, but not the garniture.
In 1857, it was loaned to the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester by the famed ceramics collector Sir Jacob Astley, 6th Baronet Astley and 16th Baron Hastings, of Melton Constable, Norfolk, who had inherited Seaton Delaval in 1817.