Jug
William Leonard Baron
Category
Ceramics
Date
1895 - 1905
Materials
Earthenware
Measurements
105 mm (Height)
Place of origin
Barnstaple
Order this imageCollection
Hill Top, Cumbria
NT 641568
Summary
Jug, earthenware, bulbous body with upright neck and strap handle, made by William Leonard Baron, Barnstaple, ca 1900; decorated with coloured glazes with a brown ground with green and blue decoration of fish swimming among reeds.
Full description
This jug, made by William Leonard Baron of Barnstaple, is part of the collection at Hill Top. Beatrix Potter purchased this farmhouse in the Lake District village of Near Sawrey in 1905, using the profits from her books. After her marriage to William Heelis in 1913, Beatrix relocated permanently to Sawrey. The couple made nearby Castle Cottage their home, but Beatrix spent as much time as she could at Hill Top. As well as a space for work and creativity – and the location for many of her famous tales – it became an intensely personal sanctuary for Beatrix. Beatrix knew exactly how she would decorate Hill Top and arranged its interiors carefully and deliberately. She wrote: ‘I would have old furniture…it is not as expensive as modern furniture, and incomparably handsomer…’ Once she had renovated the farmhouse, she filled it with examples of local furniture and treasured heirlooms, like her grandmother’s warming pan and a set of plates decorated with designs by her father. William Leonard Baron worked for Doulton Lambeth before moving in 1884 to C. H. Brannan’s in Barnstaple, making and designing pieces with some commercial success. Baron worked at Brannon’s for nine years before setting up his own business making art pottery and grotesques, which continued until the 1930s. A watercolour study of the jug filled with daffodils was made by Beatrix around 1900 and circulated to members of a drawing society she belonged to in London (Victoria and Albert Museum, LB.270). Some of their comments are preserved on the back of the work: one member wrote that it was ‘very pretty & very well painted’, another that ‘backgrounds are not supposed to look distinct. Very good.’ Beatrix returned to the jug again in a watercolour of Old Mister Prickly Pin (later known as Mr Pricklepin) sitting in his ash stump home, with the jug nestled beside him (NT243362). The image was created in about 1905 and was later used in Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes, published in 1917.
Provenance
From Troutbeck Park.
Marks and inscriptions
Underside of base: 'W.L. Baron, Barnstaple'
Makers and roles
William Leonard Baron, maker
References
Conroy 2023: Rachel Conroy, ‘A love of ‘old china, especially earthenware’: ceramics at Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top and in her ‘little books’, Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle (Volume 34, 2023), 95-112