The Grant-Davidson Gift

ORTY PIECES of and ploughing team at work and inscribed , presented to the 'John linken 1793'. Many others, such F Museum in February this as a marked creamware milk-pan, a pearlware year, are one of the most egg-stand complete with five egg-cups, a significant additions to the ceramics punchbowl painted with a swan and pike collection for many years. These are the gift rebus, perhaps for the Pike family of clay of W. J. Grant-Davidson, the distinguished merchants, will add greatly to the interest historian of the Welsh and a and variety of the displays in the Welsh past member of the Museum's Court of Ceramics Gallery. Governors. Selected from his Mr Grant-Davidson also has a outstanding study collection of British particular interest in English ceramics of ceramics from the late Middle Ages to the mid 18th century, and included 10 the early 20th century, the gift includes examples in his gift. These many pieces illustrated in his seminal complement the collection of early article 'Early Pottery, 1764- English pottery acquired for the 1810' published in the Transactions of the Museum between 1902 and 1907 by the English Ceramic Circle in 1968, and others chemist, Robert Drane. As well as which were last seen in the 'Swansea • The Swansea tankard by William three fine Staffordshire Pottery Bi-Centenary Exhibition' in Weston Young teapots and two documentary pieces of 1968. Josiah Wedgwood's creamware, these Perhaps the most exciting of all is a profession, he was subsequently a include one of the four known pieces of large earthenware tankard made at the partner in the China Works. manganese decorated creamware, attributed Cambrian Pottery, Swansea, in the opening The decoration is unique, though to the Tunstall stoneware potter Enoch years of the 19th century and decorated with Young also painted a plaque with a Booth. Made in the first half of the the head and shoulders of a druid. This is druid cutting mistletoe (now in the 1740s, these may by the earliest inscribed in the distinctive script of William Victoria and Albert Museum, ). examples of an earthenware body which is Weston Young (1776-1847) who worked at A slightly earlier piece of great one of Britain's principal contributions to the pottery in 1803-6 as a painter and as importance is a jug painted with a ceramic history. assistant to the proprietor, Lewis Weston Much of the Grant-Davidson gift will be Dillwyn. A land surveyor by on display on the Front Hall balcony at Cathays Park until 30 September.