Antique Pink Embossed Ironstone Chamber Pot with Lid, c. 1890–1910

The Piece

A lidded chamber pot in cream ironstone, moulded all over in relief and tinted rose pink. The body is a low bulbous form with a wide mouth and a stepped foot, wrapped at the shoulder with rococo cartouches and acanthus scrolls, and broken by soft vertical ribs that run down the sides. The handle is a heavy moulded scroll with leafwork at both terminals, big enough to take a whole hand.

The lid is a shallow dome with a border of moulded acanthus running right around the rim, scrolling sprays across the field, and a flower-form knob at the centre. It sits down into a recessed seat on the pot.

The colour is brushed rather than printed. Rose pink has been laid into the relief with a brush, washed across the shoulder and the lid border and then allowed to fade out toward the foot, and you can read the direction of the strokes across the plain areas. That is the tinted treatment used on moulded toilet ware rather than the transfer printing used on most decorated wares of the same date.

A separate pierced liner comes with it: a wide flaring funnel that rests in the mouth of the pot, glazed and tinted to match, with two large openings near the centre and a moulded bridge between them. We are describing it rather than naming it, because we have not been able to establish what it was made to do and would rather say so than invent a purpose for it. It is included with the pot.

The glaze carries fine crazing throughout with light staining settled into it. The foot is impressed CS.

History & Provenance

It is easy to treat a chamber pot as a novelty now. It was not. For most of the nineteenth century the toilet was outdoors, and it stayed that way a long time: a privy or closet in the back yard remained normal for middle-class households until the late nineteenth century and for working-class homes well into the twentieth. The pot under the bed was not a quaint alternative to plumbing. For most people it was the plumbing.

The indoor water closet arrived in the 1880s in a usable form, when Thomas Crapper's siphonic flush solved the leaking of earlier valve designs and Thomas Twyford produced the one-piece wash-out closet, the Unitas, in 1885. The first British toilet using the siphonic design was made at the Beaufort Works in Chelsea in 1886. Even so, fitting one was a considerable expense, and the chamber pot went on being made and used through the whole period of changeover.

The decoration is what dates this one. Sanitary and toilet ceramics went through an elaborate phase and then got plain: heavily embossed and decorated pieces belong to the years before 1900, while Edwardian production after the turn of the century is noticeably simpler. This pot sits at the decorated end of that, with relief moulding over every surface and hand-tinted colour, which is not what a maker was doing in 1912. On that, and on the depth of the crazing, it is offered as c. 1890 to 1910.

The foot is impressed CS and carries no maker's name. A bare pair of impressed letters on ironstone is as often a mould number or a workman's mark as it is a maker's initials, so it is recorded here as a mark rather than treated as an attribution.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Nobody is buying this for its original job, and that is precisely the point. What you actually have is a wide, shallow, beautifully moulded bowl with a matching lid and a good strong handle, in a soft pink and cream that sits well against wood, brass and anything green.

It is an excellent cachepot. Drop a potted fern or a trailing ivy straight into it and let the leaves break the rim. Failing that it holds fruit on a kitchen island, or keys and post in a hallway, or it goes on a shelf with the lid on and reads simply as good Victorian moulded china.