The World on a Saucer: Stories from a Ceramic Transfer Print

By Naomi Subotnick, ’22

Twelve vignettes crowd this sheet of thin, aging tissue. Inside each circular world, a different animal prowls through a foliage-bordered composition. Although these creatures are quick with life, the paper they inhabit is creased and fading, tearing away at the edges. What is this unusual object, and what can we learn from it?

This is a transfer print, for use in the decoration of ceramic wares. Developed in the late eighteenth century, the process of transfer printing represented a significant innovation in British ceramic production. The technique cannot be definitively attributed to a single individual, but rather seems to have been the work of several manufacturers between about 1751-1756. In this process, an engraved image is transferred onto a bisque ceramic object using a sheet of thin paper or gelatin. First, a mixture of metallic oxides and printing oils are rubbed into a heated copper plate engraving. After the excess is wiped away, a sheet of thin tissue paper, coated with soft soap and water, is placed atop the copper plate, which is then passed through the printing press. The tissue is trimmed to fit the object, and a bristled brush is used to thoroughly transfer the image. The tissue is then soaked away with cold water, and the object fired once more.

Far more efficient than hand-painting individual wares, transfer printing lowered the price of fashionable ceramic goods, increasing their availability to a broader public.¹ Indeed, transfer-printing may be contextualized within Britain’s long Industrial Revolution: the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries saw a dramatic increase in the export of British goods, spurred by new steam-powered machinery as well as innovations in manual production techniques. Britain’s expanding empire of goods increased access to highly decorated objects both at home and abroad. English transferware was distributed worldwide, and for many, increased access to these goods was an important aspect of forming a consumer identity.²

This particular transfer print in Winterthur’s collection was likely made between 1820-1840 by William Gallimore.³ While relatively little biographical information about Gallimore is available, it seems likely that he was born around 1812 in Burslem, Staffordshire, and worked as a designer and engraver for several of the major English potteries.⁴ His son, William Wood Gallimore, became a potter, working in Belleek, Ireland and later in Trenton, New Jersey, where the elder Gallimore seems to have joined him.⁵. The existence of Gallimore’s prints in Winterthur’s collection means that they were never actually used, as the printing process destroys a transfer print. These were likely early proofs or copies kept by Gallimore as a kind of personal reference collection.⁶ Their somewhat unusual survival presents us with a unique opportunity to consider the process of transfer printing, and the shifting material relationships between print culture and ceramic production in nineteenth-century Britain.

Transfer printing revolutionized the pottery-making process, but in so doing, it fundamentally changed the nature of ceramic objects themselves. Saucers, teapots, and tureens now became a medium for the printed image, as much a part of nineteenth century visual culture as the books and periodicals that proliferated alongside them. A common visual language emerged between the media, blurring the boundaries between print and porcelain. Like their paper counterparts, transfer-printed wares often depicted landscapes, scenes from literature, satirical commentaries, or views of those seemingly distant lands slowly being pulled into the grip of the expanding British empire. Indeed it was through print– through aquatint, lithography, and transfer-printed ceramics– that a national consciousness of Britain’s growing imperial reach began to emerge.

Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in printed images of the “exotic” flora and fauna imported for spectacle into England’s zoos and menageries. For not only was Britain exporting goods globally, it was also trying to bring the globe home, to situate itself as both the world’s supplier and its microcosm. Returning to Gallimore’s transfer print, we can see that it depicts a jumble of animals, none of which are native to Britain. It seems likely that the animals shown here refer to exhibits at the the London Zoological Gardens, which had opened in 1828. Indeed the London Zoo, or Regent’s Park Zoo, was a consistently popular theme for both printed images and transfer-printed ceramic wares: numerous contemporary examples depict the animals displayed there for public amusement. Whether or not they had actually visited the zoo themselves, consumers would have been well aware of the presence of these strange creatures in their urban midst: the stream of images of the Zoological Gardens would have served as a constant reminder of Britain’s claim to be the political, economic, and material center of the globe. 

An 1835 lithograph by George Scharf, in the collection of the British Museum, depicts the zoo in Regent’s Park as it might have been experienced by Gallimore’s contemporaries. Fashionably dressed spectators lean against the iron railing to gaze at three camels in the foreground, while a man with a top hat and umbrella strolls curiously past a zebra and several goats nearby. Their enclosures are reminiscent of Gallimore’s vignettes: together, the plates produced from this transfer print would have created a miniature ceramic zoo for the dinner table. We can imagine a consumer, fascinated by the animals depicted in this print, eager to purchase a small saucer transfer-printed with a similar image. For to purchase a plate with an image of a camel, a goat, or zebra, was to claim some sort of ownership over that creature, and to claim participation in an increasingly interconnected exchange of goods, ideas, and even living beings. More tangibly material than an ephemeral print, a ceramic object could be possessed, contained, and observed within the menagerie of one’s cupboard.

In sum, considering transfer prints themselves allows us to make new connections between production processes, and to ask new questions about the global material network that was shaping nineteenth-century Britain. Far from being a discarded remnant, this transfer print is a vital piece of material evidence, reminding us of the need to study process alongside product.