Made for a Room They Never Saw

Almost nothing in an American house was made by anyone who lived here. Most of it was made for here, by people who never came.

A pottery in Staffordshire, sometime after 1880, printing a turkey onto a platter. Nobody in that building had ever eaten a Thanksgiving dinner and nobody ever would, it isn't an English holiday. They printed it because the order said turkey, and America bought turkey platters by the thousand.

That's the trade this page is about. Not plunder, not souvenirs carried home from a trip. Purpose-built goods, made to a specification, for a customer the maker knew only as a line on an order form. It starts earlier than you'd expect, and it never really stopped.

In the 1650s the Chinese kilns went dark in the collapse of the Ming, and the Dutch East India Company took its porcelain order to Arita instead, Japanese potters making Chinese porcelain for Dutch houses. Two centuries later English potteries were printing American views for American dining rooms, commissioned by American firms who never touched a kiln. Then Japan took the English brief and sent back Toby jugs and fox hunts. Then everyone else: Sweden, India, France, Bavaria, Florence, each with an export line, all of them furnishing rooms they would never stand in.

Twenty-one pieces here. One of them is the exception, and it's at the end.