Indoor gardening in the eighteenth century - paintings of flower pots

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1999 by Patricia F. Ferguson

8 Currie, "The Archaeology of the Flowerpot," p. 237. For a red stoneware example with five holes in the base, see Jonathan Home, A Collection of Early English Pottery, part X (Jonathan Horne Publications. London, 1990), No. 269. For delftware examples see Austin, British Delft at williamsburg; Pls. 618, 620.

9 Rosalind Savill, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Sevres Porcelain, vol. 1 (Trustees of the wallace Collection, London, 1988), p. 69.

10 Svend Eriksen and Geoffrey de Bellaigue, Sevres Porcelain: Vincennes and Sevres, 1740-1800 (Faber and Faber, London, 1987), p. 290.

11 In 1757 Lazare Duvaux (c. 1703-1758), a Paris marchand-mercier, sold two "plantes d'heliotrope" with a pair of porcelain containers (Savill, Wallace Collection, vol. 1, p. 25).

12 Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book, 1766-1824, annotated by Edwin Morris Betts (1944; American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1985), p. 635.

13 See Wedgwood in London: 225th Anniversary Exhibition 1759-1984 (Josiah Wedgwood and Sons Limited, Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent, 1984), p. 28, H9.

14 An oblong container of white terra-cotta stoneware covered in brown slip made by Wedgwood c. 1785 is illustrated in Robin Reilly, Wedgwood: The New Illustrated Dictionary (Antique Collectors' Club, Woodbridge, England, 1995), p. 291. Interestingly, there are no drainage holes in the container, which is identical in shape to those illustrated in Wedgwood's order books. Presumably this example is actually a container for cut flowers.

15 I would like to thank Jeremy Rex-Parkes, the archivist at Christie's (London), for this information.

16 Wedgwood Nos. 54.30014 and 54.30024 (manuscripts in the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent). I would like thank Gaye Blake Roberts for her permission and Lynne Miller for her assistance in examining these manuscripts.

17 Ann Leighton, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: "four use or for delight" (1976; University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1986), p. 457.

18 Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary..., 4th ed., vol. 3 (London, 1754), n. p.

19 R. Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, "James Cochran: Florist and Plant Contractor to Regency London," Garden History: Journal of the Garden History Society, vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1987), p. 57.

20 Maurice Tomlin, "Osterley Park," Furniture History, vol. 22 (1986), pp. 107-129.

21 Maurice Tomlin, Catalogue of Adam Period Furniture, Victoria and Albert Museum (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1972), p. 101, Pl. M5.

22 The Genius of Architecture, or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations, trans. David Britt (Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, California, 1992), pp. 115-140.

23 For a two-piece French flowerpot of c. 1790 see Michel Bloit, Trois siecles de porcelaine de Paris (Editions Hervas, Paris, 1988), p. 47.

24 Ian C. Bristow, Architectural Colour in British Interiors, 1615-1840 (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, New Haven, 1996), p. 208. As early as 1791 Sir John Soane had used bright yellow in designs for the drawing morns at Bentley Priory in Middlesex.