In their ongoing effort to stay in tune with the fashionable public, Wedgwood turns away f...

In their ongoing effort to stay in tune with the fashionable public, Wedgwood turns away from their Classical roots looking to the tide of design flowing in from the orient -- to the delight of the most urban consumers throughout Europe.  Wedgwood's solution transforms fanciful bundles of bamboo into exotic accessories for the late nineteenth century tea table.  Appealing to a very modern, sophisticated consumer, this creamer and lidded sugar are executed in a high glaze variation of Wedgwood's taupe color drab stoneware body rather than the brilliantly colored majolica which by the 1870's was passing from fashion.  

Because we generally associate bamboo motifs with the eighteenth century craze for  C...

Because we generally associate bamboo motifs with the eighteenth century craze for  Chinoiserie design, we were surprised to see the tea kettle of this shape listed among teapot offerings in the reprint of "The '1878' Illustrated Catalog of Ornamental Shapes."  (Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, Volume II, p. 430, no. 673, plate 13). To us, this "marketing fit" seemed right, however the design could have been introduced earlier in the century and simply brought back into production in the late seventies.  In fact, Phillip Miller and Michael Berthoud, An Anthology of British Teapots include two pages of late eighteenth century bamboo motif teapots including an oriental  redware teapot in the shape of a bundle of reeds similar to this cream and sugar.  They identify it as  eighteenth century Xising redware. (p. 90, plate 540) .  They also note that variants of this shape were produced by several Staffordshire manufacturers.