
Brinson’s collection. Photograph by William Brinson/Studio Brinson.
Bob Zordani and Heidi Kellner, of Z and K Antiques, know transferware. Early nineteenth-century blue-and-white Staffordshire transferware depicting American themes is one of their specialties, and, Kellner says, “a classic that we feel will never go away.” The couple’s particular interest tracks with public events. Pieces related to the Marquis de Lafayette, for example, are gaining more attention with the bicentennial of the French general’s 1824–1825 tour of the United States. Their weakness is for transferware made by Brits for the American market, commemorating historically important, and often idealized, visions of the young nation. It’s an interesting tension, to be sure: who better to create identity-confirming household goods than your former colonizers? For Zellner, though, it’s more about beauty than contradiction.
Jacqueline Wein, a sometimes antiques dealer and frequent interiors storyteller currently at Sotheby’s, insists that these scenes are more than just romantic. They are also “part of the American story.” Despite being made almost exclusively abroad, “transferware counts as Americana because it forms one of the quintessential building blocks of American arts.” Wein herself has a large collection, but with a different focus. Instead of the popular blue-and-white pieces or those with American themes, Wein seeks out lavender and is particularly interested in floral and neoclassical designs. The color is rare enough that her collection is geographically diverse, from English to Scandinavian. It is a collection that has grown quite large since she started hunting down pieces in the pre-eBay ’90s, so now she carefully chooses those that make the cut. A fish platter recently claimed a spot on her kitchen wall, and anything with a good border, the decorative frame surrounding the central image, always stops her in her tracks.


“Extraordinary borders” also attract Andrew Raftery, an artist, printmaker, and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, aka RISD. His most recent project examines wallpaper from ideation to installation, decoding the layers of process that go into creating atmospheric spaces. Traditional wallpaper and, yes, transferware are the results of printmaking, but the steps may be more obvious for a wall covering than for dishes.

When designing for transferware in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Raftery explains, designers had to translate images that would sell onto three-dimensional forms, which requires more strategy and planning than one might initially surmise. The finalized design would be given to an engraver to carve onto a copperplate. That plate was used to “stamp” the design onto a thin soapy tissue, which was then carefully laid onto the bisque forms before being gently fired, glazed again, and then fired a final time. It was a laborious process, and the engraved plate would eventually begin to wear down. Some variation in the print due to wear was acceptable, Raftery says, as buyers “did not expect the uniformity that we expect today” in their pursuit of novelty. When a replacement was needed, and if the design was still in demand, a new plate would be made. An engraver could spend his whole career repeating the same image, over and again, to meet demand, Raftery says, “perfecting it and distilling it over time.” In a process as complex as this and as open to error, simplicity may have been advisable, but Raftery is glad they didn’t always take that suggestion. “From 1800 up to the 1850s,” he says, there was “this culture of ‘too much ornament was never enough.’”

Never enough is right in interior designer Susan Brinson’s wheelhouse. If you were to walk into her home and be confronted by the enormity of her transferware collection, “You’d be like ‘Susan, stop,’” she says. One of the great allures of transferware is its daily usability: one recent morning, Kellner was eating toast from an 1840s plate depicting Bakers Falls in New York’s Hudson valley. However, particularly fine examples should be displayed with care. This often means turning a two-dimensional image that was translated into a three-dimensional form back into a two-dimensional work of art to hang on a wall. When designing displays, Brinson is careful to “try not to get anything in too tight of a square.” Instead, she allows for an “illustrative” sprawl that suggests motion and plays into the curves of the dishes and the details of the designs. “If I am going to live in this world, I want to be surrounded by things that capture my imagination,” Zordani says of his own addiction. “I want my head full of beauty.”
“There’s a transferware out there for nearly any person,” Wein explains. “Try to pick something to be passionate about that isn’t instantaneously available.” Which isn’t that difficult, to tell the truth. Whether it’s a color, pattern, or maker, no matter how specific, it’s nearly impossible, in the world of transferware, “to get to the bottom of it,” Raftery notes. “You can never possibly collect it all.”