✨uwu brodinsons✨

Late last summer, during what would become their final diving season, the Parks Canada team exploring the wreck of HMS Erebus recovered from the ship's presumed steward's pantry this object:

The pitcher caught my eye. It is a beautiful thing, heavily ornamented despite its quotidian use, and well preserved considering it spent the last 175 years at the bottom of Wilmot and Crampton Bay. Only the lid (as indicated by the two dark notches either side of the lip) and the handle are missing.

I know nothing about Victorian pottery but it didn't hugely surprise me to learn jugs like this were mass produced by the time Franklin sailed his doomed ships from Greenhithe. So I went on eBay and bought one for myself in the same colour. Total cost: £42.78, including shipping.

The pitcher was made in William Ridgway & Co’s Church Works factory in Hanley, Staffordshire. It is stamped with the date 1835 and a number indicating its size. The Fitzwilliam Museum, which holds an example, tells us it would have been used as "a popular household mainstay for water, beer milk and other liquids which might now be kept in bottles, cans or plastic jars".

The relief mouldings which cover the pitcher (likely by modeller James Leonard Abington) show scenes from the popular 1791 poem "Tam O'Shanter" by Robert Burns. Tam, after a night of drunken carousing with his mate Souter Johnny, sets out into a storm astride the mare Meg and before long happens upon the Devil and his crew having a wild knees up in the ruins of Alloway Auld Kirk. Discovered, he flees but the witches fly in pursuit and poor Meg has her tail ripped off by Nannie the witch, who earlier had so distracted Tam with her dancing and her "cutty sark" (short shirt).

This last dramatic scene seemed to be a particular favourite among the poem’s many depictions, even inspiring the great Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix:

The pitcher recovered from Erebus' tragic wreck also shows Meg being robbed of her tail by Nannie — but it is only when examining an undamaged example that we learn the scene is actually depicted twice: once on the pitcher’s bowl and again on its handle, which is shaped like a horse's tail being grasped by a hand.

art fight attack for @bialbovi >:3