What a Load of Rubbish! Pot Lids: How Proto-Advertising Made Packaging 'Art'
Nic Saintey examines how proto-advertising made the humble Victorian pot lid used
as part of daily packaging into 'art' that is widely collected today. The fascinating
story of their transformation from the utilitarian to the collectable starts over
150 years ago.
An F&R Pratt pot lid depicting Queen Victoria.
What is art, can packaging be art and could you frame toothpaste tubes and gaze
pleasingly at them?
Of course, Andy Warhol did his thing with Campbell's Soup cans, but that wasn't
actually packaging, but a representation of it. However, some packaging
is collected and indeed framed as art in its own right, namely the pottery pot lid.
As the name suggests, it is a lid for a pot, generally circular, made of pottery
and predominantly printed in colours. The decorating technique owes much to the
genesis of lithography and the discovery in the 1830s that it could be used to
add multi-colour decoration to a ceramic body. This coupled with the Staffordshire
'Potteries' ability to produce a commercially consistent product at an affordable
price meant that in the following decades companies like Ridgway, Brown
Westhead, Moore & Co, Mayer, Cauldon and
especially F&J Pratt produced many tens of thousands of these store
cupboard objects.
A Rifle Contest at Wimbledon depicted on a Pratt pot lid.
Household names and more modest purveyors took advantage of this colourful packaging
to sell meat paste, sundry spreads, relishes, toothpaste, cold cream, hair pomade,
toilet powder and even tobacco.
Whilst some of the decoration related to the contents, such as Fry's chocolate paste
having a view of Trinidad (where their cocoa beans came from), most decoration bore
no relevance to the contents whatsoever.
A pair of pot lids 'War and Peace' after original works by Sir Edwin Lanseer.
The subject matter used was broad and varied with over 500 separate designs being
recorded and many using source prints reproduced from popular paintings by Sir Edwin
Landseer, Philip Wouvermann, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Teniers
and Thomas Gainsborough, so it seems little wonder that many of these utilitarian
lids made the short transition to being art.
Of course, unlike bespoke paintings, pot lids are at the modest end of the price
scale, but as proto-advertising, they certainly reflect socio-historic values and
what made Mr Average part with his cash can certainly provide a window on his life.
A Pratt pot lid 'A Pretty Kettle of Fish', sometimes called 'Lobster Sauce'.
Some of the earliest pot lids featured a multitude of views of Pegwell Bay in Kent.
One wonders why this randomly selected seaside town was such a hit? Its popularity
stems from an 1830 visit by Princess Victoria to nearby Ramsgate where in common
with others she enjoyed snacking on seafood.
Her first Royal Warrant on accession was issued to Tatnell & Sons Purveyors
of 'potted shrimps in the ordinary'. Royal patronage made this delicacy very popular:
if it's good enough for HM then its good enough for you, and over time twenty three
different Pegwell Bay designs were used.
A Bears' Grease pot lid entitled 'Shooting Bears'.
Much rarer are those pot lids decorated with bears. Bears' Grease was considered
up until the beginning of the 20th century as an effective treatment for hair loss
under the naïve assumption that bears are hairy, therefore their rendered fat applied
to the scalp would promote vigorous hair growth. The illustrated example is derived
from a print entitled Bear Hunt in the Pyrenees that appeared in the London
Illustrated News in January 1853.
Another popular group relates to exhibitions starting with the 1851 Great Exhibition.
They were a mix of commerce, art and industry and were an entirely appropriate subject
matter for aesthetic packaging and may even have been especially produced for retail
at Crystal Palace.
A TJ&J Mayer pot lid: Grand International Buildings 1851.
Needless to say others followed suite and there are examples for the 1853 New York
Exhibition, the Paris Exhibitions of 1867 and 1876 and were
still in production for the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.
Other decoration includes royalty and worthy individuals (in what might have been
seen as the first example of product endorsement), literary subjects (Shakespeare
features heavily), famous landmarks and flora and fauna.
A Mayer Pegwell Bay subject fishpaste jar: Mending the Nets.
Whilst pot lids account for the largest volume, other jars and decorative boxes
were given the same treatment and all found buyers, so the step from being an effective
method of making your product stand out, to being a pleasing way to decorate other
wares, was an obvious one and in time plates, bottles, candlesticks, mugs, jugs,
tableware and even the humble potty were given an artistic face lift.
This range of competitively priced brightly decorated pottery was probably ideal
for the aspiring classes, but rather lacked finesse in comparison to the porcelain
wares of Worcester, Derby and Wedgwood so I suspect there probably was a degree
of Victorian snobbery towards it.
I don't know whether pot lids were framed whilst still in production, but a century
or so later, I come across them regularly framed as art works in their own right,
which considering they were made 150 years ago as disposable packaging is no mean
feat.
- Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood
- Pot Lids
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About the Author
 | Nic Saintey Ceramics and GlassNic Saintey has been a director of Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood since 2003 and heads up the Ceramics and Glass Department. He is part of the team specialising in Chinese ceramics and works of art. Nic's first career was in the Armed Forces where he served both as a military parachutist and paramedic. He joined a firm of Somerset auctioneers in early 1995 and Bearnes during a period of expansion in June 2000. His effervescent nature, sense of humour, broad knowledge and experience has seen him appear as an expert for BBC television programmes. He undertakes regular talks to both academic and general interest groups talking on subjects as diverse as Staffordshire pottery and pop culture, Chinese porcelain and the troubled relationship between Britain and the Orient, the English drinking glass and the Donyatt potters. He is an occasional contributor of articles for national and local publications and is equally fascinated by the stories attached to pots as he is about the objects themselves. His personal interests include Oriental and domestic pottery, but especially that produced in the West Country. Accompanied by his Lurcher Stickey, he is a keen Moorland walker (but only in the winter), an increasingly slow runner and a chaotic cook who always eats his own mistakes and, yes of course, he collects pottery!
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Commemorative Ceramics was written on Tuesday, 2nd May 2017.