BOSTON MEETING

Boston State House, John Rogers & Son (1815-1842), 10 in. plate

The Boston State House today.  Still in use.  No cows.

Some of you know that I am one of the founders of the Tranferware Collectors Club.  This October we held our 14th annual meeting in Boston (October 17, 18, 19 and 20).  I thought I'd share some of the highlights of the meeting with the hope that you will be enticed to come to our 15th annual meeting in Mendenhall,  Pennsylvania and at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware next October (16, 17, 18, 19, 2014).

We toured Boston and the surrounding area.  We heard eight lectures* (for a list of the titles of the lectures, see below) and saw lots of pottery.  We visited the Boston State House, the Old State House, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and more. The weather was gorgeous (this was pure luck).

Picking up Fall Color near Boston

I didn't know there was an Old State House.  I photographed it sitting happily among the modern buildings that surround it. 

Old State House Boston

The Old State House was built in 1713 and was the seat of the Massachusetts legislator until 1798.   It is the oldest surviving building in Boston and today serves as a history museum.  You can see the Old State House in the print below which is titled "The Boston Massacre."  It was engraved by Paul Revere after a design by Henry Pelham.  The bloody skirmish between the British soldiers and the citizens of Boston occurred on March 5, 1770.  This information is totally an aside, but an interesting one!

"The Boston Massacre"/notice the Old State House in the background. 

Curators at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) welcomed us with a tour of some of the collections that included transferware.

Teapots at the MFA/notice the transferware examples

These are just a few of the highlights of the Boston meeting.  I close with a child's mug that I wish was still available as a souvenir of Boston.

"Present from Boston" 2 in. by 2.18 in. child's mug, ca. 1830

*Lectures/Peggy Sutor: "Architecture As Seen on Historical Blue Transferware, 1815-1835, Part II: The New England States," Pam Woolliscroft: "The Josiah Spodes, Pottery Pioneers," Dick Henrywood: "English Views and Their Sources," Dick and Judy Wagner: "Frank and Sissie: Beardsmores, Bennetts & Pots," Pam Woolliscroft: "Pots of Orchids: The Spode Bateman Connection," Louise Richardson: "Starting Over at Fifty: A Northern Ireland Merchant's Move to Portsmouth, NH in 1796," Royce Walters: "Westward Ho! And the Transferware Market in the Early Midwest," and Terry Woolliscroft: "The Tale of the Toilet."