Featured Battered but not something you see every day

I had my eye on this large ewer for four or five months but didn’t take the plunge firstly because I didn’t know the maker and secondly because the damage was too much for the price.

The seller finally cut the price and I bought it and have finally managed to identify it. Anybody want to have a stab just for fun?

 

John, you must just LOVE pottery to have rescued this ewer. I always click into your posts to see what weird (to me) pottery you've recently found. To me, the mark looks Asian, but IDK.

 

Guessing quite old, that's all I got. Following this thread...

 

Antique but not ancient. Probably c1880

 

There’s a big clue to its origin in the handle.

 

I thought maybe a dragon, but my eyes are kinda bad right now. Then I saw a squirrel howling at the moon so I decided not to comment on the handle in my original response, lol! Mexican? No, Italy.

 

Is it a sphinx?

 

It smacks of the Ruskin/William Morris mentality to me so probably one of the English art potters of the era?

 

Hm. Linthorpe?

 

Lots of great suggestions. Blooey is on the right lines in terms of style. Here's a clue. The animal is a tiger.

 

Not typical colours but has a look of the Indian/Sind to me.

Kinda in this vein:

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O450855/ewer-and-lid-ewer-unknown/

 

Yes. I am fairly confident that it is a piece from The Bombay School Of Art I haven't found a great deal about it but it seems that some of the potters were English and potted in the style seen in England at the likes of Della Robbia in the late 19th century. Searches for Bombay School Of Art bring up quite a few similarly decorated pieces.

 

This from the V& A website.

The Bombay School of Art, whose ceramic productions were traded under the name of Wonderland Art Pottery under the direction of George Wilkins Terry, who had been appointed as its first drawing master in 1857. The pottery flourished from the mid 1870s until about 1890, but limped on after Terry's retirement at that time into the early years of the 20th century. Early wares were influenced by those manufactured in Sind as Terry set up his workshop with a Sindhi craftsman called Nur Muhammad. Soon, however, much of the decoration came to be influenced by the cave paintings at Ajanta, and were copied by the Schools students over a period lasting from 1872-1885. The ceramic students also adapted Ajanta motifs, as here, in an attempt by the School to encourage traditions of Indian art rather than European ones. Liberty imported some of the Wonderland wares to sell in its Regent Street shop in London

 

Ah, nice. I think Indian Della Robbia sums it up perfectly.

 

Very informative. I know just a little about ceramics and always enjoy learning here.

 

And there I was, leafing through the Doulton Bible today, which has very similar flowers on some late nineteenth pieces. I do love the networkin of pots.