Teapot

John Bartlam

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This teapot represents the entrepreneurial and intrepid spirit of eighteenth-century America. Made at the pottery established by John Bartlam in Cain Hoy, South Carolina, outside of Charleston, it was intended to compete with the popular luxury porcelains with underglaze blue decoration that were produced in England and imported to the colonies. Porcelain required specialized clays, deposits of which had only recently been discovered in the Carolinas, and were being mined and shipped to England from Charleston. Josiah Wedgwood feared that the success of the Cain Hoy enterprise would become serious competition to his stronghold in the American market, writing in a letter to Thomas Bentley in 1767, of a "Pottwork in Charles Town" that used Cherokee clay" from the Carolinas to make porcelain. This is one of only seven examples that can be associated with the Bartlam factory, all teawares, and all which feature the Palmetto, a motif not found in English porcelains, but which is a direct reference to South Carolina.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art