Pottery, porcelain, bone china, ironstone, majolica, stoneware, and dozens of other kinds of dishes have been made through the centuries. But each of these is different, with its own characteristics, strengths, and flaws. Pottery is opaque. You can’t see through…
Fashions in clothing, furniture, and pottery and porcelain change. Spatterware, majolica, ironstone, and moss rose pattern have gone in and out of fashion, but by the 1980s collectors and museums began to realize the artistry of some of the pieces.…
Prints, photographs, and all sorts of small paper ephemera, including baseball cards, postcards, and labels, became important to collectors in the twentieth century. Printed pictures, often drawings, were published to illustrate news stories in the nineteenth century. Lithographs, woodblocks, even…
The twentieth century saw astounding changes in the American home and American food. The nineteenth-century housewife killed the chicken, plucked its feathers, and cleaned, cut, seasoned, and cooked the chicken on an open flame. By 1990 she went to a…
Glazed ceramic tiles have been used to decorate buildings since the days of the ancient Egyptians, but the history of modern tiles starts in sixteenth-century Britain, Spain, and Holland. At that time, overall repetitive designs inspired by Moorish motifs were…