Painted tea caddies and the tunbridge connection

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2004 by Noel Riley

The Commutation Act of 1784 was probably the single most important stimulus in the development of the tea caddy in eighteenth-century Britain. Up to this time, tea had been so expensive that it could be enjoyed only in small quantities and exclusively by the elite, who usually kept their tea leaves in beautifully decorated canisters of silver, enamel, or ceramic that were set into finely made caskets of wood, tortoiseshell, shagreen, or other decorative material. The act reduced the tax on tea dramatically and so made it more widely available. Not surprisingly, the storage vessels for tea leaves, produced as part of the tea equipage, became more varied than ever before.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As well as caskets with removable canisters and sometimes a central glass bowl for sugar (another expensive item in the tea ritual), there were now containers with one or two lidded compartments lined with metal foil. It was at about this time that the term caddy seems to have come into general use. The word is derived from the Malay kati, a weight of about six hundred grams or about twenty-one ounces.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Tea caddies were made in an increasingly wide range of shapes--oval, round, octagonal, navette (oval with pointed ends or boat-shaped), serpentine, rectangular, or square. They still invariably had locks and keys to keep the precious contents safe. Materials were used with corresponding inventiveness. Typical of the last two decades of the eighteenth century were tortoiseshell contrasted with ivory, silver, cut steel, or mother-of-pearl; papier-mache or japanned tin with delicately painted borders of classical motifs in tune with the fashionable style of Robert Adam; and silver decorated with bright-cutting or embossing. Marquetry examples represented the majority of tea caddies at this point, but there was also an interesting group decorated by amateurs in the paper filigree technique known as quilling.

Painted decoration for tea canisters and caskets had been favored at least since the middle of the eighteenth century, with examples in pottery, porcelain, opaque glass, enamels, and the japanned tin-plated iron wares of Pontypool and Usk in Wales. Tea caddies of painted wood appear to have emerged as part of the growth in tea caddy production during the 1780s, and several distinct types of decoration have been noted. Two in particular are the focus of this article.

The first is a group of polychrome caddies in the form of miniature houses and cottages, and the second is the group painted in the black and white technique now known as penwork. Both flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century--the houses probably from about 1810 to 1825 and the penwork examples from about 1820 to 1850. Published information about these techniques is almost nonexistent.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The very obvious differences in style between these two decorative types tend to mask an intriguing connection between them. Both took their cue from the engraved ivory work produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at Vizagapatam (now called Vishakhapatnam) in eastern India, specifically for members of the British Raj. (1)

The painted miniature houses made in England bear more than a passing resemblance to the ivory-clad Indian examples with their engraved and blackened details of windows, doors, people, and other details (see Pl. III). The Indian examples were rare and expensive in Britain, and it is highly probable that the simple painted versions were conceived as a cheap substitute intended for a popular market. While it has been suggested that the Indian ivory cottages were made in imitation of the English painted versions, (2) the converse is more likely to be the case, since the Vizagapatam products almost certainly date from an earlier period. However, the original models for the Indian buildings, which have no parallels in Indian domestic architecture, would certainly have come from Britain, just as models for Anglo-Indian furniture were supplied to the Vizagapatam craftsmen.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a similar way, penwork was developed to imitate the glamorous ivory-inlaid furniture of Vizagapatam, with its engraved floral designs set into dark ebony, rosewood, padouk, or sandalwood (see Pl. II). Indeed, penwork was often known as "imitation ivory inlaying" in the nineteenth century. (3) Other connections between the two types will become apparent.

Painted miniature houses have appeared in many parts of the world, even as far away as New Zealand, (4) and there has been occasional speculation as to their origins. They represent a romantic view of the rural cottage inhabited by worthy and contented laborers, in line with the period's taste for picturesque rusticity and in contrast to the strident realities of the industrialization that was gathering momentum in many parts of Britain. Popular publications as well as paintings and prints promoted an idealized rustic landscape punctuated with pretty cottages. When these boxes appear on the market today, they tend to be labeled "Tunbridge ware," and are almost invariably given a date of about 1820. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Tunbridge ware was the generic term for all kinds of novelty wooden wares, usually made as souvenirs, whether or not they came from the town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. (5) Such wares are known to have been produced in London and Brighton as well as Tunbridge Wells, and both makers and sellers of these wares are recorded in other parts of Britain. The more specific association of the term Tunbridge ware with the type of mosaic wood decoration developed in the 1820s and 1830s is much more recent.