EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: An American-Made Red Earthenware Tea Canister that was Recently Found in Maine

Friday, January 20, 2017

An American-Made Red Earthenware Tea Canister that was Recently Found in Maine

This is an object that I purchased a few years ago from a Maine antiques dealer, where the dealer also told me that this object was found in Maine. I believe this form was intended to be used as a tea canister, which is a rare form to find from any eighteenth or nineteenth-century American red earthenware potter today.

There is plenty published today about American potters, who produced teapots, teacups and tea bowls in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries; however, there are not many examples of American-made red earthenware tea canisters known to exist. Outside of this example, the only others that I know about are two objects owned by Winterthur in Delaware, which are decorated with sgraffito that were made by Pennsylvania-German potters in the late-eighteenth-century.

This form is similar to some English creamware tea canisters, which were produced in places, such as Staffordshire, England in the eighteenth-century. But it was also a style that was widely popular with eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain potters, as well.

I have not found a lot of evidence to provide an attribution for this object, but I do feel that it was likely made in either southern Maine (or North Yarmouth, Maine) or (more likely) in Essex County, Massachusetts, circa 1790-1840.

Note: The production of this canister's base is very-similar to the base found on the black-glazed red earthenware jar that I wrote about yesterday, which was likely made by the Southwick family in Peabody (formerly South Danvers), Massachusetts. It should also be noted that the consumption of tea was definitely popular with citizens in Salem, Massachusetts and Boston in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries; it is certainly possible that this canister may have been made at any of the nearby potteries in Peabody.

According to the Boston Tea Party Ship, "It didn't take long for citizens of Salem and Boston to develop an almost unquenchable thirst for tea. By 1771, the East India Company estimated that a chest, or about 340 pounds of tea was consumed by the 17,000 inhabitants of Boston every day. It proved to be a lifestyle which many Bostonians (and people from Salem) found difficult to abandon."

Rare Red Earthenware Tea Canister