: With its earthy palette and arresting design, the pottery
Americana collectors casually, sometimes inaccurately, call
"mocha" appeals to practiced eyes. The artist Leonard Baskin and
fashion designer Bill Blass were fans. With many others, they
were drawn to mocha's graphic, often unpredictable combinations
of dots, dashes, bars and speckles; painterly ribbons and swirls;
diamonds, checkerboards, squares and motifs suggestive of cat's
eyes, twigs, worms and, significantly, trees and seaweed.
As one might guess about a man whose email address begins with
the prefix "mocoloco," Jonathan Rickard is the most ardent
enthusiast of all. The former advertising executive turned
self-employed writer and designer has nursed his obsession for 30
years, living surrounded by his pots in an Eighteenth Century
cape-style house near the Connecticut River.
Rickard's pursuit recently culminated in Mocha and Related
Dipped Wares, 1770-1939. Published by University Press of New
England in association with Historic Eastfield Foundation of East
Nassau, N.Y., the long-awaited book, written and designed by
Rickard with images by the author and noted decorative-arts
photographer Gavin Ashworth, is visually seductive and compelling
in its scholarship, accomplished over the past 17 years.
For students and collectors, the volume explores both history and
technique; categorizes different types of decoration; showcases
prime examples; advances the general understanding of the role of
turners in mocha production, listing many of them by name;
contrasts the mainly British pottery with comparable French and
North American wares; and includes an annotated directory of
manufacturers along with an extensive bibliography.
This rare double jug dating to circa 1830 is one of only six
examples known of this form, most likely designed for carrying
water. One example was illustrated in 1903 by Edwin AtLee
Barber; Eldred's in Cape Cod auctioned two others in the 1960s.
Courtesy William King.
"I've traced the misuse of the term mocha over the past 150
years," the author confesses. In England, mocha traditionally
referred only to banded wares with treelike, or dendritic,
decoration caused when a turner, the artisan most responsible for
the pot's appearance, dribbled an acid solution, such as tobacco
tea, onto the alkaline slip. In the United States, mocha is often
broadly thought to encompass similar appearing examples of
factory-made, lathe-turned, banded earthenware decorated by dipping
the vessel in slip, then manipulating the slip to create pattern.
Mocha was most likely named after the Yemeni port city of al
Mukha, famous for moss agate, says Rickard. Though British-made
dipped wares date to the 1770s, the first documented instance of
mocha pottery appears in Lakin & Poole's 1790s invoices for
"Mocoe tumblers." Primarily produced in Staffordshire but also
made in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, mocha, among the cheapest
ceramics available in America, was exported in quantity to the
United States between 1800 and 1840. France produced dipped
faience of similar appearance. Banded yellowware with dendritic
decoration was made in North America from around 1830 to the
early Twentieth Century.
"Through most of the Twentieth Century, collectors associated
dipped ware with grandmother's Victorian-era yellow mixing
bowls," says Rickard. As a consequence, prices for early mocha
languished for generations.
