Lancasters Ltd "Sairey Gamp" Character Jug, c. 1930s–Early 1940s Hand-Painted Staffordshire

The Piece

One of English pottery's great comic faces: Sairey Gamp, the tipsy nurse of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, modeled as a character jug with her every attribute in place — the ruffled bonnet tied under a formidable chin, the black bow, the polka-dot gown, and her inseparable rolled umbrella forming the handle. The modeling is wonderfully unflattering in the character-jug tradition: apple cheeks, knowing eyes, and a mouth mid-anecdote, all painted by hand in a soft palette of cream, rose, and bottle green.

The base carries two marks: "Handpainted — Made in England" and the crown-topped "English Ware, Lancasters Ltd, Hanley" stamp — a Staffordshire pottery mark used before the firm's mid-1940s reorganization, placing this jug in the golden inter-war years of the character-jug revival.

History

The character jug — a face where a vessel ought to be — descends from the Toby jugs of the eighteenth century, but it was the 1930s that made them a national obsession, when Staffordshire potteries began issuing beloved figures from English literature and legend. Dickens characters led the parade, and few were more popular than Mrs. Sarah "Sairey" Gamp: the gin-fond, monologue-prone nurse whose umbrella was so famous that "gamp" entered the English language as slang for one. Modeling her umbrella as the jug's handle is the kind of joke this genre was born for.

Lancasters Ltd of Hanley — one of the six towns of the Staffordshire Potteries — produced hand-painted novelty and character wares under its crowned "English Ware" mark through the 1930s and into the war years, before reorganizing as Lancaster & Sandland in the mid-1940s. Their jugs offered the same wit as the famous Doulton versions at a friendlier price — a distinction that survives in the collecting market to this day, and works in the buyer's favor.

Product Details

Why It Belongs In Your Home

Character jugs are shelf personalities — one face among the books and bottles and suddenly a room has a sense of humor. Sairey earns her spot three ways: as a pen or brush pot on a desk, as the most literary member of a bar cart, or as the conversation piece she was always meant to be — because the story of the umbrella that named all umbrellas is the kind of thing guests remember. Ninety years old, hand-painted, and still mid-story.