[Illustration: Figure 76.--BLUE-AND-WHITE Chinese porcelain.]
The success of the new whiteware in permitting the use of underglaze blue resulted in a second class that is decorated in the Chinese manner, after the style of English delft and porcelain. This type was popular between 1780 and 1790, especially in the United States, where many whole specimens have survived above ground. Several sherds are among the Marlborough artifacts and appear to have come entirely from hollow forms, such as bowls and pitchers.[200] Sherds from a blue-and-white mug with molded designs, including the shell motif around the handle, have been found also.
[Illustration: Figure 77.--BLUE-AND-WHITE Chinese porcelain.]
The third class of whiteware, which was heavily favored in the export trade, consisted of a gay, hand-decorated product, popular at the end of the 18th, and well into the 19th, century. It had pleasing variety, with floral designs in soft orange, green, brown, and blue, often with brown or green borders. A few examples of this later whiteware occur among the Marlborough artifacts (fig. 74b). One sherd from a small bowl is mottled in blue and touched with yellow (USNM 59.1805, fig. 74b). Another is also mottled, but in gray and blue. Such wares as the latter were made by Hartley, Green & Company at Leeds before the factory's demise in 1820 (USNM 59.1950, fig. 74b).[201]
The transfer-printed wares that were so popular in America after 1820 are represented by a mere eight sherds, which is in accord with evidence that the mansion house was unoccupied or destroyed after 1819. Of these sherds, only five can be dated before 1830. Two are pink, transfer-printed sherds of about 1835-45, and one is gray-blue, dating from about 1840-1850.
BLACK BASALTES WARE.--Another late 18th-century innovation by Wedgwood, imitated by his competitors, was a fine stoneware with a black body, called black basaltes because of its resemblance to that mineral. A few sherds of this were found at Marlborough. Typically, they are glazed on the insides only. They postdate John Mercer by twenty or thirty years.
[Illustration: Illustration 33.--Blue-and-white Chinese-porcelain saucer (fig. 76, top left). One-half.]