#Pilkington's Royal Lancastrian

[synchronicobject]

The Message of the March Wind by William Morris Illuminated by Gordon Forsyth (1879-1952) Gifted from the artist to artist Gwladys M. Rodgers of Pilkington's Royal Lancastrian Pottery.

"

Fair now is the springtide, now earth lies beholding With the eyes of a lover, the face of the sun; Long lasteth the daylight, and hope is enfolding The green-growing acres with increase begun.

Now sweet, sweet it is through the land to be straying ’Mid the birds and the blossoms and the beasts of the field; Love mingles with love, and no evil is weighing On thy heart or mine, where all sorrow is healed.

From township to township, o’er down and by tillage Fair, far have we wandered and long was the day; But now cometh eve at the end of the village, Where over the grey wall the church riseth grey.

There is wind in the twilight; in the white road before us The straw from the ox-yard is blowing about; The moon’s rim is rising, a star glitters o’er us, And the vane on the spire-top is swinging in doubt.

Down there dips the highway, toward the bridge crossing over The brook that runs on to the Thames and the sea. Draw closer, my sweet, we are lover and lover; This eve art thou given to gladness and me.

Shall we be glad always? Come closer and hearken: Three fields further on, as they told me down there, When the young moon has set, if the March sky should darken We might see from the hill-top the great city’s glare.

Hark, the wind in the elm-boughs! from London it bloweth, And telleth of gold, and of hope and unrest; Of power that helps not; of wisdom that knoweth, But teacheth not aught of the worst and the best.

Of the rich men it telleth, and strange is the story How they have, and they hanker, and grip far and wide; And they live and they die, and the earth and its glory Has been but a burden they scarce might abide.

Hark! the March wind again of a people is telling; Of the life that they live there, so haggard and grim, That if we and our love amidst them had been dwelling My fondness had faltered, thy beauty grown dim.

This land we have loved in our love and our leisure For them hangs in heaven, high out of their reach; The wide hills o’er the sea-plain for them have no pleasure, The grey homes of their fathers no story to teach.

The singers have sung and the builders have builded, The painters have fashioned their tales of delight; For what and for whom hath the world’s book been gilded, When all is for these but the blackness of night?

How long, and for what is their patience abiding? How oft and how oft shall their story be told, While the hope that none seeketh in darkness is hiding, And in grief and in sorrow the world groweth old?

Come back to the inn, love, and the lights and the fire, And the fiddler’s old tune and the shuffling of feet; For there in a while shall be rest and desire, And there shall the morrow’s uprising be sweet.

Yet, love, as we wend, the wind bloweth behind us, And beareth the last tale it telleth to-night, How here in the spring-tide the message shall find us; For the hope that none seeketh is coming to light.

Like the seed of midwinter, unheeded, unperished, Like the autumn-sown wheat ’neath the snow lying green, Like the love that o’ertook us, unawares and uncherished, Like the babe ’neath thy girdle that groweth unseen;

So the hope of the people now buddeth and groweth, Rest fadeth before it, and blindness and fear; It biddeth us learn all the wisdom it knoweth; It hath found us and held us, and biddeth us hear:

For it beareth the message: “Rise up on the morrow And go on your ways toward the doubt and the strife; Join hope to our hope and blend sorrow with sorrow, And seek for men’s love in the short days of life.”

But lo, the old inn, and the lights, and the fire, And the fiddler’s old tune and the shuffling of feet; Soon for us shall be quiet and rest and desire, And to-morrow’s uprising to deeds shall be sweet."

[cooperhewitt]

Once Upon a Time in Lancashire

At moments of dramatic social and cultural change a reflection on the past, or, better put, a past reimagined and romanticized, often offers a path of cathartic escape. Such was the case as Great Britain was transforming rapidly under the effects of modernization during the nineteenth century. The expansion of global communications and transportation, acceleration of industrialization, instability in financial markets, and unregulated encroachment of cities into natural environments all instilled a sense of vertigo among members of British society. By the middle of the century a feeling spread among artists and intellectuals that solutions to the social ills brought about by their present and notably modern moment could be discovered in the past.

For the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and cultural critics such as John Ruskin, the medieval era presented a model of social cohesion lost in the modern world.[1] These artists looked to the dignity found in the artisanal labor of medieval guide workers and held up the Gothic cathedral as an example of the power of artistic, as well as social, collaboration. This longing for a past—one decidedly idealized—held sway over generations of British artists and designers until World War I.

This historical yearning is exemplified by this vase produced by the Lancashire-based Pilkington’s Tile and Pottery Company. Painted by Gordon Mitchell Forsyth, the vase is decorated with the heraldic symbols, such as the lion, that call back to England’s feudal history and Arthurian legends.[2] Yet what makes this vase distinctly modern is Forsyth’s anachronistic blending of allusions to medieval Britain with the shimmering iridescence of the vase’s lustreware glazes—a decorative pairing that would not have been found on British ceramics during the medieval period. Lustreware was first developed by glassmakers in either Egypt or Syria in the eight century.[3] The glistening lustre surface was created by the introduction of metal oxides that would produce the dazzling optical effects when fired (a subject addressed in a past Cooper Hewitt exhibition, Iridescence). A fascination with the technique spread throughout Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century as archeological excavations uncovered numerous examples of iridescent pottery and glass throughout the Islamic world.

The psychedelic effect produced by lustre surfaces stimulated fantasies of a past romantic age filled with mystery and magic and free from the scientific obsessions of the nineteenth century. Pilkington’s Tile and Pottery Company responded to this trend, particularly after viewing the range of iridescent objects put on display at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair by the likes of Tiffany Studios or the French potter, Clément Massier. Ironically, the lustre surface of this vase was the product of intense scientific experimentation. Since its founding, Pilkington’s operation relied on advances in chemistry and technical analysis to create its products. The company employed William Burton—originally a chemist at Josiah Wedgwood & Sons—early on as a manager. Later, Burton brought on Abraham Lomax, an armature chemist, who would go on to create the glazes for a line of pottery he labeled “Lancastrian,” to which this particular vase belongs.[4] With its painted decoration and creative use of lustre glazes, this vase provides a magnificent example of the tensions between past and present being explored at the turn of the twentieth century.

Devon Zimmerman is a Fellow in the Product Design and Decorative Arts Department at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park.

  [1] Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 9–10.

[2] Forsyth was greatly influenced by other historical styles from Persia, Spain, and Greece. See A. J. Cross, Pilkington’s Royal Lancastrian Pottery and Tiles (London: Richard Dennis, 1980), 59.

[3] Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, Islamic Arts (London: Phaidon, 1997) 111.

[4] Cross, Pilkington’s Royal Lancastrian Pottery and Tiles, 25.

from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum https://ift.tt/2wK9r0w via IFTTT

[thecousinswar]

Today in history, July 29, 1504: the death of Thomas Stanley, First Earl of Derby:

"Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, KG (1435 – 29 July 1504) was an English nobleman and politician. He was a titular King of Mann, and stepfather to King Henry VII of England. He was the eldest son of Thomas Stanley, 1st Baron Stanley and Joan Goushill.

A landed magnate of immense power, particularly across the northwest of England where his authority went almost unchallenged, even by the Crown, Stanley managed to remain in favour with successive kings throughout the Wars of the Roses until his death in 1504. His estates included what is now Tatton Park in Cheshire, Lathom House in Lancashire, and Derby House in the City of London, now the site of the College of Arms.

Although the king for the early part of his career, Henry VI, was head of the House of Lancaster, Stanley’s marriage to Eleanor, daughter of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury (a descendant of Edward III) and sister of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (‘Warwick the Kingmaker’) in the late 1450s constituted a powerful alliance with the House of York. This did him no harm, however, even after Warwick was toppled from power, and in 1472, with the House of York now occupying the English throne, he married his second wife Lady Margaret Beaufort, whose son, Henry Tudor, was the leading Lancastrian claimant. He was the last to use the style ‘King of Mann’, his successors opting for the safer ‘Lord of Mann’. Stanley was “a man of considerable acumen, and probably the most successful power-broker of his age”.

After the death of his father in 1459, Stanley inherited his father's titles, including those of Baron Stanley and King of Mann as well as his extensive lands and offices in Cheshire and Lancashire. It was a formidable inheritance and gave him ample opportunity to gain experience in the leadership of men. At the same time, his father's prominence in the king's household had provided him with an early introduction to court where he was named among the squires of Henry VI in 1454. Nevertheless, in the febrile and bloodthirsty circumstances of the Wars of the Roses it was a position fraught with danger as rival claimants for the throne – successively the Houses of Lancaster and York – demanded, threatened or begged for the support of Stanley and his followers.

Henry demonstrated his gratitude to his “right dearly beloved father” by creating him Earl of Derby on 27 October 1485, and the following year confirmed him in office as Lord High Constable of England and High Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster, besides granting him other estates and offices. In 1486 Stanley also stood as godfather to Henry’s eldest son, Arthur, Prince of Wales. Even so, at the time of the Lambert Simnel rising of 1487, there may have been some concern that the Stanleys were again hedging their bets, and “there was relief in the royal host when the Stanleyites came in at Nottingham”. The aftermath of the Battle of Stoke, which crushed this rising, brought still further rewards for Stanley – notably the lands forfeited by Viscount Lovell, Sir Thomas Pilkington, and Sir Thomas Broughton in Lancashire and elsewhere. In 1489 the Stanleys again made a notable contribution to the army raised by Henry to suppress a rising in Yorkshire. Less successfully, Stanley’s brother William unwisely supported the later pretender Perkin Warbeck, and was, at last, executed for treason in 1495.

Throughout his career, alongside the main performance of national events, the preservation and enhancement of Stanley’s own role as regional magnate was a very important sideshow. Change of regime never really weakened his grip on the key offices of Chester and Lancaster and throughout his life Stanley consolidated the legacy he had inherited from his father and extended his hegemony and that of his family across the north-west. Given the range of his office-holding both regionally and at court, he did not need to draw ruinously on his own resources to dispense patronage on a grand scale and he was active in the arbitration of local disputes; even state matters were regularly referred for his personal adjudication. That said, ‘good lordship’ also had its harder face and the Stanleys brooked no opposition and tolerated few rivals in their areas of dominance.

Stanley died at Lathom, Lancashire on 29 July 1504 and was buried in the family chapel in Burscough Priory, near Ormskirk in Lancashire, surrounded by the tombs of his parents and others of his ancestors. He had been predeceased by his eldest son and heir, George Stanley, Lord Strange by a matter of months and was succeeded as Earl by his grandson, Thomas Stanley, 2nd Earl of Derby. “In his will of 28 July 1504 he ordained masses for the souls of himself, his wives, parents, ancestors, children, siblings, and, ever the good lord, ‘them that have died in the service of my lord my father or of me’”."