Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2001 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

In 1972 June deH. ("Jimmy") Weldon came across a small earthenware cockerel covered in a multicolor glaze that struck her fancy. Not only did it resemble the logo of her husband's farm products business, but it was associated with an eighteenth-century English potter, Thomas Whieldon, whose surname sounded much like theirs. She placed it in her husband Henry's Christmas stocking, and thus was initiated one of the finest collections of English pottery in the world today.

The Weldons have recently donated this outstanding collection of some 725 pieces to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. In explaining their decision to give the collection to Williamsburg, Mr. Weldon commented, "Joined with the ceramics already in Williamsburg, these two collections will form the strongest assemblage of English pottery in America, indeed, in the world."

Dutch-born and educated in Europe, Mr. Weldon came to the United States during World War II, served as an intelligence officer with General George Patton, and then made his fortune here. "I think of Colonial Williamsburg as America's museum," he wrote, and "I wish to recognize the wonderful things America has done for me and repay my debt through this gift to the nation."

The objects illustrated here, including the seminal rooster and a matching hen (illustrated at right), provide the merest hint of the collection's riches. In date, it ranges from the midseventeenth to the midnineteenth century, with the lion's share being eighteenth-century earthenwares and salt-glazed stonewares. It includes every imaginable and unimaginable animal, bird, figure, and decorative and useful object. One of the most unusual is the figural tea-table group shown below The only other known example of such a group is a tavern-table scene also in Williamsburg's collection. Superbly modeled, both provide significant information about the social scene in mid-eighteenth-century England. Here the figures represent the epitome of gracious sobriety stylishly dressed and enjoying the ritual of afternoon tea served by a black servant at a table set with all the tea equipage of a fashionable household.

Teawares, of course, included teapots, of which the Weldon Collection has many The one illustrated above is the earliest documented English cream-colored earthenware example known. The inscription on the bottom places its manufacture in Tunstall, Staffordshire, in October 1743. It is considered to be the work of Enoch Booth, who is credited with developing the cream-colored body.

Like the cockerel, the pair of crane candlesticks illustrated at the left is of sentimental as well as art historical interest. The Weldons owned one, and after many years of diligent searching Mrs. Weldon found the other and presented it to her husband on their fiftieth wedding anniversary No other examples are known in salt-glazed stoneware.