Willow pattern

The Willow pattern is a distinctive and elaborate chinoiserie pattern used on ceramic kitchen/housewares. It became popular at the end of the 18th century in England when, in its standard form, it was developed by English ceramic artists combining and adapting motifs inspired by fashionable hand-painted blue-and-white wares imported from China. Its creation occurred at a time when mass-production of decorative tableware, at Stoke-on-Trent and elsewhere, was already making use of engraved and printed glaze transfers, rather than hand-painting, for the application of ornament to standardized vessels (transferware).

Many different Chinese-inspired landscape patterns were at first produced in this way, both on bone china or porcellanous wares, and on white earthenware or pearlware. The Willow pattern became the most popular and persistent of them, and in various permutations has remained in production to the present day. Characteristically the background colour is white and the image blue, but various factories have used other colours in monochrome tints and there are Victorian versions with hand-touched polychrome colouring on simple outline transfers.

The exact moment of the pattern's invention is not certain. During the 1780s various engravers including Thomas Lucas and Thomas Minton were producing chinoiserie landscape scenes based on Chinese ceramic originals for the Caughley 'Salopian China Manufactory' (near Broseley, Shropshire), then under the direction of Thomas Turner. These included scenes with willows, boats, pavilions and birds which were later incorporated into the Willow pattern. However the Caughley factory did not produce the English Willow pattern in its completed form.

Thomas Lucas and his printer James Richards left Caughley in c.1783 to work for Josiah Spode, who produced many early Chinese-inspired transferwares during the 1780s and 1790s. Thomas Minton left Caughley in 1785 and set up on his own account in c.1793 in Stoke-on-Trent producing earthenwares: he is thought to have engraved versions of willow designs for Spode and for various other factories. It was probably for Spode that the English Willow pattern was created and first produced perhaps around 1790, because it incorporates particular, distinctive features of earlier Chinese willow scenes which were already known and imitated at the Spode factory.

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