A Staffordshire Spill Vase, pottery, circa 1855
This Staffordshire spill vase is modelled as a boy and a girl standing either side of a drinking fountain, with the girl’s right hand resting on a jug. Their clothes are decorated with underglaze cobalt blue, and orange and green enamels. The girl wears a yellow hat with her hair in ringlets. A hollow tree stump forms the vase for holding spills – thin strips of wood used for transferring a flame from the fireplace to a candle or lamp. At the children’s feet are clumps of flowers made of sieved and painted clay. Water from the fountain drains away in the channel below, with the front of the base formed as two shallow arches. As the spill vase was intended for display on a fireplace, the back is flat and undecorated.
There is a worker’s tally mark in red on the base.
Sometimes referred to by collectors as Clean Water or Fresh Water for All, this model celebrates improvements made to public health in England and Wales around the middle part of the 19th century, most notably as a result of the Public Health Act of 1848. This was the first in a series of acts to stress the importance of providing the population with clean drinking water.
Condition: There is a tiny flake to the edge of the girl’s hat and the back of the boy’s head, and a very small nick to the foot rim. There is some wear to the gilt details, and typical crazing to the glaze. From manufacture, there is a small blob of glazed and painted clay near the base. The enamel decoration is bright and colourful. No restoration or overpainting.
Dimensions: Height 16 cm; Width (across the base) 9.6 cm, (across the widest point) 11.5 cm; Depth (across the base) 5 cm
Staffordshire Portrait Figures of the Victorian Era, P.D. Gordon Pugh (Antique Collectors’ Club, 1988).