The Curious Case of the Sugar Bowl

In a jaunt to a local antique store to pick up some very expensive wax for chalk paint, which is another story, I came up on this sugar bowl. I looked it over and was fascinated. Curious and Curiouser...

It had a price tag of just $8.00 and I was attracted by its toile pattern on black and white transferware. Two Italian gents are poling a gondola on the side and and having a chat on the lid. There are misty castles in the background. Ah romance...

One handle is intact and the shape is lovely. Its about six inches side to side, four inches tall about four inches wide. This bowl would have held a powerful lot of sugar, back in the day when sugar was just becoming commonly available.

I wondered about sugar because this is a sugar bowl. I discovered these fascinating tidbits at WholeVegan.com: "1792 Anti-Saccharite Society forms in Europe to protest effect of sugar on people's health. It induces a British sugar boycott through Europe. The British East India companies, which was already involved with opium drug trafficking, uses the slavery issue in their PR advertising campaign to improve their company images. Their ad said, "East India sugar not made by slaves." Wow, sugar was already a problem in 1792!

In 1800 the average Englishman consumed 18 pounds of sugar annually, by 1900, it was up to 90 pounds per person. It was called "White Gold" until the middle of the 18th century because it was so expensive--and I'm not even going into sugar fights and taxation, the British versus America.

I have a feeling this was part of a tea set because I have seen one tea pot for sale with the same lines in blue and white at the price of $300.00. I wonder where the teapot and creamer went and when?

 

Inside my remaining piece of the set the bottom has a piece of leather covering a hole. A twisted metal wire is holding it on. There is another piece of leather on the outside as the other half of that patch.  Inside the bowl showed major crackage even with the leather patches and most definitely would not hold sugar without some sugar leakage.

 

The other side had a repair of a second break with a flat head brass screw in it through what looked like a piece of brass imprinted with a peacock feather pattern.

What??? I turned it over loved the china mark. So cool, that sealed the deal. I had to have it.

What was this thing? And why is it basically bolted together? And how? I couldn't wait to hit the internet and start digging. God bless the internet, if you are a good researcher it brings the world at your fingertips. It took over 5 hours to get some answers, but what a fascinating journey to Wonderland.

I started out trying to figure out who made it and where. Rummaging through tons of sites, I found the leopard wearing a crown was used in Great Britain to signify a city, in this case London before 1831. I think from the rest of what I discovered that date may be a little loose, but it was a starting point. So, its British and I think I can read Mayer and something Port. How many pottery/porcelain marks could have a Goddess and the word "Non Pared"?

Ah ha! NONPARED is an English adaptation of the French non pareil, meaning "No Parallel"
Another clue. I also noticed my leopard truly had a crown and was really nicely developed-more clues to dating. More rummaging on the word Mayer brought the answers, sort of...

Elijah Mayer was the patriarch of a family of master potters in Staffordshire. He was influenced by the Davenports (another famous potting family) and Josiah Wedgewood, there he is again...my non-Wedgewood Wedgewood plates were recently the subject of another blog at www.artfulrabbit.com

 

Elijah had three sons, Thomas, Joseph and John. Joseph stayed with dad until 1837 when dad died, the brothers then banded together at LONGPORT to create the Dale Hall Pottery. They actually have a batch of back marks, which are all famous, and this one which was harder to find. The mark in blue above says NONPAREIL, the leopard  has no crown,  the goddess has changed a bit and you can see the sailing ship clearly to the left and the thistle and rose also to the left on this mark. This one is attributed to 1840 and I'm betting mine with NONPARED is probably closer to 1837 before the leopard lost his crown and their spelling improved.

Thus far I know it is T J & J  Mayer. Transferware from Longport, circa 1837. That doesn't explain the button or the peculiar mends. Someone must have really loved this piece to go to these great lengths to keep it more or less intact. As I fell asleep last night it dawned on me. Glue? When was glue that would repair china invented?

More rummaging on the history of glue showed that glue goes back to at least 4000 BC when early man used tree sap to hold broken pottery together. The first glues were animal based and wood glue was the first in heavy use. Violins and furniture owe their long life to glue, think Stradivarius and Duncan Phyfe. The most advances in glue have been made in the past 100 years. Before the advent of modern glues, glue was not waterproof. Oops, teacup glued with fish glue or hoof glue? Not so good for your health in more ways than one.

More digging, discovered the fascinating fact that the Japanese came up with first solid waterproof glue. True lacquer, insect based, was used to fix breaks and repair ceramics. It was highly valued and the Japanese respected and esteemed pieces fixed this way as having extra value. The repair was often brushed with gold. "Uushi requires a very high humidity and a long time (24 hours) to set. It is irreversible and extremely toxic to work with. While aesthetically challenging for Western tastes, when coated with gold it is protected from oxidation and light and thus very stable. Other lacquer types found in China and Burma are less stable and have not been found as repairs. True urushi would allow the ceramic to be reused, a feature important in Japanese culture."JAIC 1998, Volume 37, Number 1, Article 5 (pp. 49 to 67) by Stephen Koob

Not so much here, no one wants to view the cracks even if they are gilded, so until 100 years ago, broken china was pretty much tossed. Which makes me wonder how a sugar bowl from Staffordshire England, circa 1834 got to Washington State in such a state? I did more reading and discovered early repairs were made with metal and armatures. Voila! They might be secured with mortar or plaster. Double Voila! I unwired the button from the top and discovered a bit of gray cement holding the wire firmly in place. Mortar, and I'm betting there is a little dab underneath the leather patches too. So my repairs are pre-glue and over 100 years old most likely.

Last but not least, the button. Crossed swords on a brass button. Where did that button hail from?

At first I thought Civil War. Nope. For some reason, I had it in my head that crossed swords meant cavalry. Bingo, and thanks memory-like-an-old-bank-vault. More digging through crossed swords, rapiers and then ah ha! sabers, brought up a similar image that was a cavalry emblem of crossed weaponry. More digging brought up this from Collectors Weekly:

Its an 1881 Enlisted man's cavalry helmet. I hunted up several of them to ensure my research and find it amazing that American cavalry wore such Prussian-looking head pieces until 1910. Notice the button on the side? It is my crossed sabers that now decorate the sugar bowl in lieu of a lid. Whose button was this and why was it used? I'll never know...

I can't even begin to speculate on the peacock patch, especially since flat head screws have been in use since 1513, which would making dating this one tough.  I'm quite pleased with my archaeology of the sugar bowl though, someone loved this it enough to figure out how to patch the beautiful thing. It was fixed before china-fixing glue came along, most likely about a hundred years ago, and the button dates the repairs to after1881. The bowl itself dates to (probably) 1834 and it crossed an ocean and a country to get to my hands 185 years later.

 

I will enjoy my mysterious gondoliers even more knowing what I know of them now. I look forward to the next mystery....