Pratt Ware 1780s – 1840s.

How great to have a type of pottery called Pratt Ware. The few examples I’ve found probably aren’t strictly from Pratt Ware whose defining feature is relief moulding,  the forms were usually figures or jugs. Instead I’ve found tiny, tiny thin pottery shards hand painted in pratt colours, magnified in the photo below. They seem to come from both creamware and the blue tinged pearlware, both are present in shards below. I suspect they may all be from tea bowls or saucers. 

Mudlarking Finds: Creamware and Pearlware hand painted in pratt colours

There is something I just love about these pieces, the combination of the muddy greens,   browney oranges with flashes of cobalt blue and the snapshot of such detailed miniature hand painted designs crammed onto each of these small fragments.

In this period artists were constrained in the colours they could use. Only colours that could withstand the high kiln temperatures required to fire lead glaze were available to them, namely cobalt for blue, copper and lead for greens, manganese oxide and iron were mixed to produce brown, orange was produced by adding iron oxide to yellow oxide. But there is something even more specific about the tone of Pratt colours.

Their name derives from the pottery they became associated with, the Pratt pottery in Fenton Staffordshire, although this type of pottery was also churned out by many others in Staffordshire and in other areas of England and Scotland. I've found it almost impossible to track down images of table and teaware in pratt colours, although I've had more luck in finding the more 'official' pratt ware. 

Prattware jug, circa 1820 (Martyn Edgell)

The hand painted ware was phased out around 1840 as the cheaper and more popular transfer wares began to predominate

Prattware jug with the Kings initials GR, circa 1810 (Martyn Edgell)