Areca Nut Pot Lid

Victorian

Circa 1860–1910 | England

An antique Victorian Areca nut toothpaste lid from the nineteenth century. Transfer printed in monochrome sepia brown on cream earthenware. (see The Gen).

DIMENSIONS: Width 6.3 cm.

SIGNATURES, MARKINGS & INSCRIPTIONS: Unmarked.

CONDITION: In very good condition, with wear commensurate with antique age and use of such a piece. The lid looks to have been restored. The whole print looks good. The underside and the flanges are all overpainted. In fact, there has been a final gloss coat put over the whole lid. Feels like large parts of the flanges have been rebuilt. Superb job, the lid looks great! The restoration speaks to the rarity of this piece that someone thought it worthy to be repaired.

REFERENCES: For an example of a similar pot see The Keen Collection. 

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THE GEN

“Pot lid graphics are a fascinating example of the vitality and rich inventiveness of Victorian and Edwardian advertising art. Monochrome and bi-colour lids with printed designs and advertising legends burned in’ under the glaze covered containers for bears grease, toothpaste, cold creams, pomades, meatpastes, ointments, shaving creams, and salves. They were manufactured in prolific quantities by most of the potteries of the day. For many years they were regarded as the poor relations of the multi-coloured (polychrome) pictorial lids manufactured by Pratt, Mayer, Kirkham, and Ridgway, but in recent years monochrome advertising lids have appeared in greater variety and profusion, particularly since the new hobby of bottle collecting and dump digging emerged in the early 1970’s, and they are now avidly collected. Commoner types change hands at £5 to £15 and rarer specimens command prices ranging from £30 to £100. Several hundred varieties have already been recorded and previously unseen designs crop up almost weekly as collectors continue to probe Victorian and Edwardian tip sites up and down the country or search long forgotten cellars and attics.

With a few exceptions they were transfer printed from a steel or copper engraved plate and fired under the glaze in one colour, usually black on white, although a number are found printed in cobalt blue, green, red or sepia brown. A few are printed on a different coloured ground and occasionally in two or more colours. It was a process which had been first discovered in Liverpool in the 1790’s.” (The Advertising Art of Printed Pot Lids, Roger Green and David Lewis, Old Bottles and Treasure Hunting, 1979, p. 8)

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