Over the years I have puzzled over an odd-looking type of ceramic ware found at archaeological sites in New England, usually represented by a single potsherd. It is a high-fired earthenware so dense it resembles dry-bodied stoneware, with a thick brown glaze that seems to curdle atop the surface of the pot (fig. 1).
An example of this ware found at the Narbonne House in Salem, Massachusetts, during excavations there in the 1970s was identified as German stoneware, but, as is usual in archaeology, the analysts were more interested in the preponderance of the ceramics than in this single, seemingly anomalous, find and did not undertake research into its history.[1] A similar single sherd among the ceramics recovered from excavations at a nineteenth-century boardinghouse in Lowell, Massachusetts, also generated little interest—our analysis did not even mention the ware because the single sherd was not statistically significant in the collection.[2] In the late 1980s, we found another single potsherd of the ware, this time beneath the kitchen floor of the Spencer-Peirce-Little House (SPL) in Newbury, Massachusetts; this was a rim sherd—a lid seating for a vessel like a tea canister.[3] Again it was a single sherd, found in a nineteenth-century context but not considered worthy of much attention. But in 1996 excavations at SPL began to turn up numerous examples of what my students referred to as “wormy ware,” “dog-hair ware,” or “ugly ware.”
Soon we had enough fragments to make up at least one teapot and one tea canister, and I realized I needed to know what this ware was and what significance it might have, if any, to my interpretation of the site. A colleague in art history suggested the pottery was Japanese, so I began to look into the literature on Japanese pottery. None of the art books carried anything that resembled my “wormy ware,”[4] but I soon learned that after the United States opened trade with Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912), Americans were seized with a passion for goods, particularly decorative art objects, from Japan.[5] Japonisme, as the craze was known, was fed by the ramped-up production of Japanese kilns and factories, which churned out goods for export that American consumers adored but that lovers of fine art declared gaudy and grotesque—one writer declared that “even in an industrial museum their influence would be pernicious.”[6]
The definitive attribution for my mysterious “wormy ware” I found in trade catalogs for A. A. Vantine & Co. of New York, importers of fine Oriental art and furnishings.[7] My teapot and tea canister fragments were indeed among the vessel forms produced in Japan for export during the Meiji period (fig. 2). The Vantine catalogs refer to the ware as “Water Drop” and claim that it was so popular and well known it needed little description. A catalog from the 1890s explained that the ware was a porous earthenware, called “Water Drop” from the resemblance of the glaze to drops of water; made in teapots and water bottles, the latter used in hot countries to keep water cool by placing them in a draft, evaporation taking the place of ice. The teapots are known all over the country and need no special mention. Some have a medallion with paintings of flowers and shrubs in glazed paint on the side; those are known as Water Drop Medallion.[8]
The catalogs showed teapots and chocolate pots (fig. 3) and mentioned, but did not illustrate, Water Drop Medallion, nor have I seen any examples from archaeological or other contexts. Soon after my discovery in the archives, I came across an intact example of a Japanese Water Drop teapot at a local flea market (fig. 4). Like the example found at SPL, it is small in capacity and shows evidence (i.e., slight charring) of having been placed atop a burner of some sort; the base of each teapot has three small bumps that may have facilitated placing the vessel upon a burner.
Beyond the craze for things Japanese, the Victorians also found anything considered rustic to be very appealing as an element of household decor. Water Drop ware exhibits a certain rustic character, and this, along with its links to japonisme, may have been at the root of its appeal to Victorian Americans.[9] Archaeologists would do well to consider the cultural context in which this seemingly innocuous and, to many a modern eye, unattractive ware was used. It enabled its owners to express metaphorically an aesthetic of rusticity and to exhibit a knowledge of things Oriental. The number of sherds we find may be statistically insignificant but even a single Water Drop teapot carried complex meanings for its owners and for those invited to partake of tea poured from it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My research on Water Drop ware was conducted in 2001 under the auspices of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Advanced Study at The Winterthur Museum and Library. I am especially grateful to Neville Thompson, former librarian at Winterthur, for guiding me toward the A. A. Vantine & Co. trade catalogs in the Winterthur collection. I also thank Grace Ziesing for sharing with me her notes on the family history project she is conducting.
Mary C. Beaudry, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology
Department of Archaeology
Boston University
<beaudry@bu.edu>
