Pots with Attitude - Talk

To coincide with The Fan Museum's new exhibition, Early Printed Fans, Patricia Ferguson (Project Curator, Monument Trust, 18th Century Prints and Ceramics, British Museum) will deliver an illustrated lecture relating to her fascinating exhibition at the British Museum, Pots with Attitude: British Satire on Ceramics, 1760 - 1830.

Ceramics are rarely confrontational, yet when printed with political messages with a powerful agenda, they are trasformed. The invention of fine creamware and the development of transfer-printing on glazed clay in the 1750s coincided with the great age of British printed satire. hand coloured prints parodied the political and social elite, and humour dissipates the unconfortable truths in these single sheet works published published in London between 1770 - 1830. while these were sold to the urban upper-classes, a more widespread audience in inns, taverns and cottages enjoyed these same messages on common pottery.