COLLECTIBLES : Rare Spongeware Soaked Up by Admirers
Colorful, utilitarian 19th-Century spongeware appeals to collectors, who may pay around $60 for a blue-sponged mug or small cut-sponge bowl once used for soups and porridge and up to $550 for rarer motifs.
“People are not usually interested in purchasing just one piece,” London antiques dealer Josyane Young said. “And they are becoming fussy. They are looking for unusual forms or designs--not more examples of items they might already have in their collection--and they want the pieces to be in excellent condition.”
Spongeware takes its name from the look of its decoration and from the manner in which that decoration was applied, most likely by dipping a sponge into pigment and dabbing it over the surface of a lighter-colored pot, either in a free-flowing overall pattern or in a more controlled design, such as a border or band.
Sometimes the tight-pored root of a sponge would be cut into shapes that were then saturated with color, and used to create a design that would be stamped onto the pot.
Pieces decorated by this latter technique are known alternately as cut-sponge, stick-spatter or stick-sponge (a reference to the belief that the pieces of shaped sponge were placed on the ends of sticks for easier manipulation), design spatter, Portneuf (after the Canadian town where so much of the ware surfaced) and, simply, sponged ware or spongeware.
“Some collectors call that type of ware ‘potato’ pottery, since the potters actually used stamps made from potatoes, not sponges, to transfer the motif on to the spot,” Young said.
“Here in England, though, we are not so technical about the name. We tend to lump it all together as ‘spongeware,’ whether the design was actually applied with a sponge or it just looks as though it may have been.”
Sponging provided 19th-Century potters with an easy, inexpensive method of bringing color and pattern to large quantities of kitchen and tableware. Applying color to pottery with a sponge had been used centuries earlier in China. In the prolific factories of early Industrial-era England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the practice flourished.
Although an enormous amount of spongeware seems to have been produced, much of what we know about this pottery today is a result of educated guesswork. The period’s potters apparently were too busy churning out products to mark their spongeware or to record their decorating in explicit detail.
Among the known makers are Adams and Bristol in England, Bo’ness Pottery in Scotland and Swansea in Wales.
“Spongeware was made in America, too, of course,” Young said. “And I have also found pieces from France and from the Middle European countries, but all of these pieces are very different in character from the British ones.”
Today the most pursued sponged wares are those made in England from about 1830 to 1880, when increased mechanization and more efficient methods of transfer printing all but eliminated the hand-decorating of everyday ceramics.
Spongeware of all types is becoming increasingly difficult to find and costly to acquire.
No one wanted to buy spongeware 20 years ago, but collecting gained momentum, and in the past five years, spongeware has begun to disappear from the marketplace.
“These are joyful pieces,” Young said. “They reflect the comfort of a laden table after a hard-working day, and it is a testimony to their strength and practicality that they have endured years of demanding use.”