Plate Visual Elements
This particular portrayal of Boston Common and the State House offers an intriguing window into how people conceived of the landscape as an open pasture. Views of American landscapes began appearing on printed pearlwares around 1818 (Miller & Earls 2008). Although made specifically for the American market, most of the patterns continued to be general in nature. However, there was a small group of designs that became the most desirable of all collectible printed pottery - patterns illustrating the new nation of the United States (The Transferware Collectors Club, The Winterthur Museum, & Historic New England). Consequently, the image of Boston Common and the State House that is printed on "Plate" would be considered a highly desirable ceramic in early 19th-century America, one that hearkened back to the nation’s founding moment.
The State House added immeasurably to the Common's appeal because America's upper classes valued neighborhoods near elegant seats of government (Rawson 2014, p. 34). In fact, the State House was so well liked that some wealthy Bostonians set their tables with plates, platters, pitchers, and creamers adorned with renderings of the State House presiding over a Common dotted with cows (Rawson 2014, p. 55).
Beneath the State House are cows and sheep grazing, a worker with a wheelbarrow, and a few individuals on a stroll. In the early 19th century, carpet cleaning and militia drilling were still regular occurrences on the Common, holdovers from the 17th century (Rawson 2014, p. 29). The cows did the most work of all by grazing all day and doing the biological labor of turning grass into milk (Rawson 2014, p. 30). Bostonians’ relationship to this natural landscape began to change significantly around 1820 when wealthier families began to move to the area. Although white upper-class Bostonians valued pastoral imagery of Boston Common, their relationship with the actual Common was more tenuous in this period. Wealthier Bostonians were developing a preference for a more recreational relationship to natural landscapes in the early 19th century and, as a result, they came to believe that productive activities were degrading the gentility of the Common and inhibited their enjoyment of the land (Rawson 2014, p. 23). Reformers focused their attention on removing the cows from the Common and regulating pasturage, resulting in a decade-long civic debate between the upper classes and working classes over the use of the Common (Pendery 1990, p. 45). Working class individuals valued the land for access to labor while upper-class Bostonians used it for leisure (Rawson 2014, p. 23). Interestingly, both groups' relationships with the land are portrayed in this image, perhaps signifying the growing schism between socioeconomic groups and their conceptions of nature. Aristocratic distaste for manual labor inspired a landscape ideal that treated productive work as if it were inconsistent with nature, reflecting a larger unraveling of the close relationship between labor and leisure in America (Rawson 2014, p. 36). Boston Common was beginning to shift from a pasture into a park in this period because the upper class sought to reform the Common into a place for recreation.
This depiction of the State House on John Rogers & Son's plate was tied to emerging artistic trends that supported land enclosure and consolidation, inspiring new ways of thinking about nature and capitalism (Rawson 2014, p. 55). Around this time in New England, environmental philosophy had begun to shift away from Romanticism. Drawing from rational lines of thought, people began to believe the pastoral landscape brought its own rewards (Ruff 2015, p. 122). The image of the landscape started to represent aesthetic, moral, political, and even religious values (Ruff 2015, p. 136). Thus, a realistic representation of a pastoral Boston Common signified the land's distinct virtues and its benefits for human wellbeing. A subsequent implication of this ideological transition is that people began to regard nature as its own distinct entity because it was something separable from humanity.