Mad About Mocha: A 30-Year Infatuation With Dipped Earthenware

CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY

: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.

"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.