1998

Teapot with Lid on Stand

English, born 1942

Walter Keeler, a contemporary British potter, uses traditional methods of ceramic decoration in innovative and often witty ways. On this teapot, Keeler used sponged metallic oxides and included a crabstock handle (a handle in the form of a knotted branch of a crab apple tree). Pottery decorated with metallic oxides, traditionally referred to as "tortoiseshell ware," was popular in eighteenth-century England, and a number of the eighteenth-century works exhibited in this case have this type of decoration.