Hand-Thrown Studio Pottery Charger, Cobalt Sponged Rim with Painted Ivy Trails, American, Contemporary

The Piece

A wide, shallow charger, thrown on the wheel rather than pressed — the potter's spiral runs out from the centre of the well in a clean series of concentric ridges you can feel with a fingertip, and the rim rises and falls very slightly the way a thrown rim does.

The decoration works in two registers. A band of dense cobalt sponge-work runs the entire rim edge and is carried right over the lip onto the underside. Inside it, on the flat of the rim, sit two hand-painted sprays placed opposite one another: a trailing ivy vine drawn in a fine looping line, with one deep cobalt leaf at the centre of each and paler blue leaves opening off the stem.

The ground between them is left plain — a warm off-white with the throwing rings showing through the glaze — which is what lets the two sprays read as drawing rather than as pattern.

The underside is glazed to a broad unglazed foot in a pale speckled stoneware body, stamped at the centre with a circular maker's mark.

History & Provenance

The mark is the whole story here, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not tell us.

It is a circular stamp around a central device. The ring is legible in part: it begins CONTEMPO and ends POTTERY.COM. The four or five characters between are blotched where the stamp did not take fully, and we are not going to invent a reading for them. The piece is offered unattributed.

But the part that is legible settles the date on its own. The mark contains a web address. No potter put a URL into a maker's stamp before the web existed to point at, which places this firmly in the modern era — late 1990s at the very earliest, and realistically more recent than that. It is described here simply as contemporary, because a narrower range would be a guess.

That matters more than it might sound, because sponge-decorated blue-and-white is a look that reads old at a glance and is very easily sold as something it is not. This is a modern American studio piece, not antique spongeware, and it is not related to the Italian sponged ware it superficially resembles.

What it genuinely is, is hand work. The throwing rings are real, the sponging was done by hand with a sea sponge, and the ivy sprays are painted freehand — the two are similar but not identical, which is the signature of a brush rather than a transfer. A pottery that stamps its own web address into the clay is a working business that wants to be found, and this came off a wheel rather than out of a press.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Priced as what it is — a damaged decorative piece rather than a working charger — this is an inexpensive way to get a large hand-thrown, hand-painted surface onto a wall or a shelf, and scale is the thing that is genuinely hard to buy cheaply.

On a plate stand, propped on an open dresser, or hung flat, it does the job a small framed picture cannot: the cobalt rim reads as a ring of colour from across a room, and the two ivy sprays give the eye somewhere to land up close. The cracks run in from the rim and are largely lost against the sponged band at normal viewing distance.

Blue and white also never has to be matched. It will sit with any other blue-and-white already in the house, and against cream plaster, warm wood, black metal or open shelving it is an easy, familiar note.

A note on care and use. Do not serve food or liquid on this piece. The cracks pass through the body, which means they will hold water and anything else that gets into them, and no amount of washing clears a crack in stoneware. Treat it as wall and shelf decoration only.

Do not wash it in a dishwasher and do not soak it. Water drawn into an open crack, then heated and cooled repeatedly, is precisely what turns two cracks into a piece in three parts. Dust it dry, or wipe the face with a barely damp cloth and dry it straight away. Use no abrasive pad and no cream cleaner, which will scratch the glaze and dull the cobalt.

If you hang it, use a properly sized spring wire plate hanger with the arms padded, and seat the arms on sound rim, away from the cracked sections — a hanger tensioned across a crack is what finishes the job. On a stand, let the weight sit on the foot rather than the rim. Keep it out of direct sun and away from a heat source.