Glass and Porcelain
c. 1792 Liverpool Creamware “Sailing Ship” Transfer Mug
c. 1792 Historical Liverpool Creamware Tankard/Mug, with an American Flag “Sailing Ship” Transfer, Choice Extremely Fine.
This beautiful, well-preserved Mug or Drinking Tankard measures 6” tall and 4” in diameter. It displays a large American Sailing Ship flying an American Flag with 15 Stars (representing 15 States with Kentucky having been added in 1792). The sharply detailed black transfer image takes up the entire face of this Tankard. Overall, this early Liverpool Mug is completely solid and even shows various sailors and crew manning the Sailing Ships decks. A most desirable example, rarely encountered with this design. Its excellent clean details and high quality make it very attractive for display.
Historical (1760 to 1820) “Liverpool Creamware” is the collector name generally given to pottery produced in England during the mid-18th and into the early-19th century. These decorative pieces were produced by expert potters who were obsessed with the idea of copying quality Chinese porcelain, then considered to be the highest quality ceramic available. Certain potters, such as Josiah Wedgewood, Thomas Whieldon and Josiah Spode, made improvements to the existing earthenwares which they named “Creamware” (or in Wedgewood’s case “Queensware”).

This thin earthenware was dipped into a clear glaze, which combined with the natural impurities of the clay to give the ware a creamy, pale yellow tint. Creamware is readily identifiable as a pottery having a cream-colored body and a perfectly clear glaze. The earliest transfer prints were applied over the glazes of the creamware, a practice which continued well into the 19th century.

The dates of production of Liverpool Creamware ran from 1760 to 1820, with the Revolutionary War figures and events predominant. Normally all of the transfer prints were done in black, with the exceptions of a very few pieces found with transfers in red, rust, carmine, sepia, lavender, or green. The latter three are really quite rare. Certain Liverpool potters made it a practice to embellish the black transfers with a variety of hand-applied enamels in red, blue, green, yellow and brown. (See Arman: “Anglo-American Ceramics Part I” pages 11-21).