Pitcher c. 1840

This pitcher was made by the Staffordshire Potteries, sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. The neoclassical imagery of the figures in relief speak to the fascination with antiquity at the time, something that would have been cultivated in the educational institutions of Europe and America. But if we look closer, we can see that the social conditions of England at the time are also encoded in the image. The Potteries district was a center for industrial production, and produced this kind of ware for a rising middle class, eager to display its refinement and aspiration to aristocracy. Notice, too, the way that enslaved Africans were often rendered as classical figures in art of this period, gesturing to the ways in which the institution of slavery was intertwined with elite culture. To understand this object fully, we can look to the business records of the pottery, advertisements, and other archival sources to discover more about its cultural meaning in its own time.