Object of the Month - an early Doccia teapot
1st February 2024
In 1735 the Italian nobleman and entrepreneur, Carlo Ginori, began experiments in producing porcelain; firstly in Florence and then close to his Doccia estate.
By 1745 he had succeeded enough to begin selling his wares to the public. Early Doccia porcelain is characterised by its hard, grey appearance and tendency towards firing faults and cracking. A huge admirer of Medici porcelain from Florence, Ginori focused on underglaze blue decoration in emulation of the much earlier wares. He developed a stencilled technique that is unique to the Doccia factory. Known as a stampa or a stampino, this was the earliest attempt of mechanical decoration on European porcelain and involved templates based on cut outs of real flowers.
February’s object of the month is an early Doccia teapot that combines this a stampino decoration with the transfer-printing we may be more familiar with. The influences on this rare item span several areas of the art world. The fluted baluster shape derives from silver pieces in important Florentine collections. The printed decoration of putti at play copies Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella’s engravings after his uncle’s, Jacques Stella, Jeux des Enfants; the French artist worked from 1616 to 1621 in the court of Cosimo II de Medici in Florence, then spent ten years in Rome working particularly for Pope Urban VIII.
This teapot, from the collection of Bernard and Mavis Watney, provided ceramic historian, John Mallet, with the evidence needed to prove that Doccia combined the techniques of transfer-printing with the stencilled a stampa decoration; it being previously thought that a stampa gave way to transfer printing. The teapot was illustrated in Volume 22 of the Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle and is one of only two recorded, according to notes in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the second teapot is housed.
It formed part of the wider Watney Collection of Doccia that features in the Fine Pottery and Porcelain sale on 21st February, and sold for a premium inclusive £15,120.
