WHAT IS HISTORICAL STAFFORDSHIRE?

Historical Staffordshire refers to a special kind of transferware that was produced in the Staffordshire District of England as early as 1790 by one of the early fathers of British pottery production, namely Enoch Wood.

VIEWS OF LONDON-THE BANK, C. 1845

VIEWS OF LONDON-THE ROYAL EXCHANGE

Many of his competitors at the time, by 1800-1830, were now producing Historical Staffordshire Transferware. Historical Staffordshire Transferware always illustrated specific scenes of buildings, political figures, war battles and city scenes.

This means that the views are actual typographical views of real places, events e.g. battle scenes or famous people in history. These kinds of transferware scenes were made for export to the colonies, known as Canada after the Confederation in 1867, and also to the the United States of America as a means of educating the public what the rest of the world looked liked.Therefore the potters figured one way of communicating, how the rest of the world looked at the time, would be to transfer scenes on china and ship them abroad.



We have Three Major Categories of Historical China: (1) American Views, (2) British Views, and (3) Canadian Views. There are other views as well depicting the Middle East which were transferred by other British potters at the time e.g. Ralph Hall's "Carmanian Series & Indian Sporting Series."

The very first Historical China Views were produced in a very intense dark inky blue which some dealers call flow blue. Technically this first dark inky blue was not called flow blue rather Historical Blue which was produced from 1800-1820. One such example would be the early Enoch Wood 1790-1820 period; another would be Ralph Hall, and yet another would be John & Ralph Stevenson.