A rare pair - Collector's Notes - Gousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris pickle stands - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by Eleanor H. Gustafso

It is not quite like finding the holy grail or the golden fleece, but to ceramics collectors any addition to the tiny surviving output of Bonnin and Morris is a cause for jubilation. Such a find has been imparted to us by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Anthony Wand Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City who writes:

In a time of outpouring American patriotism, it seems fitting that one of the most exciting discoveries in the ceramics field of the past twenty years should be from a quintessentially patriotic enterprise-the American China Manufactory of Gousse Bonnin (1741?-1780?) and George Anthony Morris (1742 or 1745- 1773), begun in Philadelphia in late 1770. This ambitious undertaking sought to supplant English imports by providing colonists with comparable domestic ware, hut it lasted less than two years, and only a small number of examples of its output are known to survive. Now, not one, but a pair of pickle stands (Pls. I, II) has been added to the collection of Mrs. George M. Kaufman, bringing the number of known Bonnin and Morris pickle stands to six.

Three of the previously identified pickle stands are in public collections, and the fourth is in the collection of the Kaufman Americana Foundation. In form, the dishes are identical: three scallop shells on small conical feet are attached to a central shaft that is encrusted with tiny molded shells and coral and supports a fluted cup. The three in public collections all bear similar underglaze blue painted decoration in the English style of floral bouquets and butterflies (see p. 42, Fl. IV). The fourth is undecorated except for a blue border on the shells and cup (p. 42, Fl. III). What distinguishes the newly discovered pair is that each shell is decorated with a design relating to the patrons who commissioned the stands: the wealthy Philadelphia merchant John Cadwalader and his wife, Elizabeth Lloyd Cadwalader. Painted on one shell are the couple's cipher, the conjoined initials "JEG." Another shell is decorated with a coat of arms showing a shield within a mantel of rococo scrolls and foliage. The arms t hemselves consist of a cross formee pattee fitchee of gold, represented by the dotted field, on the left (or dexter), and a lion rampant on the right (or sinister). In heraldic language, the arms of the two families are joined after a marriage, as demonstrated by the arms of Cadwalader on the left impaling those of the Lloyd family of Maryland on the right. The third shell is decorated with the gold cross formee pattee fitchee of the Cadwalader arms. (1)

These elaborate stands correspond to a bill in the Cadwalader papers in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which lists "two pickle stands" for fifteen shillings apiece among the porcelains Cadwalader ordered from Bonnin and Morris in 1770. (2) The date of the porcelain order coincides with the period in which the Cadwaladers, who married in 1768, were furnishing their grand Philadelphia town house, commissioning the finest Philadelphia craftsmen to supply decorations, silver, and furniture. (3) That John Cadwalader would also support the earnest efforts of Philadelphia's brand-new porcelain factory was consistent with his political views. He had signed the Non-Importation Agreement of 1765, and his patronage of the fledgling enterprise to make porcelain on American soil is further testament to his protest against the Stamp Act.

These pickle stands are the only special order examples known from the Bonnin and Morris factory and provide us with an unexpected new window on this significant enterprise. When Graham Hood published his seminal study of Bonnin and Morris in 1972, only eleven intact examples of its production had been identified. In the past three decades that number has increased to eighteen. This discovery may provide the impetus for further study, and an effort to bring together in a future exhibition and publication all of the Bonnin and Morris examples now known.

(1.) I am especially grateful to Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, an assistant curator of American decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for her identification and explication of the coat of arms. See Eugene Zieber, Hearldry in America (1909; reprint Greenwich House, New York, 1984), p. 82, Fig. 251, which pictures a selection of arms of families who lived in or near Philadelphia, including those of Cadwalader, whose coat of arms is described as "Azure, a cross formee fitchee or." See also Charles Knowles Bolton, Bolton's American Armory: A Record of Coats of Anns which Have Been in Use within the Present Bounds of the United States (F. W. Faxon Company Boston, 1927), p. 103, which describes the Lloyd of Maryland arms as "As a lion ramp or." Kirtley's research on the Cadwalader and Lloyd cipher and arms has led her to an identical cipher on a silver tankard by Philip Syng Jr. with a Cadwalader history, in the Philadelphia Museum. She and Luke Beckerdite will publish a more extensive study of this pa ir of pickle stands in a forthcoming issue of the Chipstone Foundation's Ceramics in America.