Cups

Wedgwood

  • Titles Cups (Descriptive)
  • Artist Wedgwood, England, est. 1759
  • Medium bone china
  • Dimensions each: 2 1/2 x 3 3/4 x 2 1/2 in. (6.4 x 9.5 x 6.4 cm)
  • Credit Line Collection of the Art Fund, Inc. at the Birmingham Museum of Art; The Buten Wedgwood Collection, gift through the Wedgwood Society of New York, AFI.572.2008.1-.3
  • Work Type cups
  • Classification Containers

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One of a set of four large figures of soft-paste porcelain representing the "Four Quarters of the Globe," each depicted as a chubby child dressed in a costume deemed appropriate to his or her region and associated with symbols of the different continents. Europe: the figure of a female child wearing a white tunic decorated with flowers and cinched together with a yellow ribbon, over her shoulders she wears draped a yellow and red cloak, at her feet are symbols of the arts, sciences, and religion such as paintbrushes and a painter's palette, sheet music, books, and a bishop's miter scattered amongst flowers, in her right had she holds an orb, her left hand raised and outstretched, on her head a crown.
Half figure seated right, the head front.
Small asparagus shell of white soft-paste porcelain with low vertical, scalloped sides that taper towards one end, open at both ends to allow bundles of asparagus spears to be contained inside, the interior printed in underglaze blue in the "Fisherman" or "Pleasure Boat" pattern, each of the interior sides and above and below the printed scene a border of small blue octagonal elements with a white dot in the middle above a repeating C-scroll and dot pattern.
Large, oblong vase of heavy, beige glazed stoneware, the sides are rounded and the opening at the top is narrow, each end of the vase is decorated in an abstract, semi-geometric pattern in shades of gray, white, rust, black, and beige, the central body is decorated on each side with a broad stripe of mottled, almost metallic, gray glaze.