QUESTION - Please identify all fruit on this Moorcroft ginger jar – a design crowned above all other Moorcroft fruit designs from a design window that was opened by William Moorcroft over a century ago.
Your prize is the featured Queens Choice Ginger Jar pictured above. Whilst Moorcroft were made Potters to Queen Mary almost a century ago, the Queen that holds the design name is not of this world. Queens Choice by Moorcroft designer, Emma Bossons FRSA was inspired by Titania’s words in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by William Shakespeare(Titania; Act 3, Scene 1; Line 170–180) has arguably become one of the most admired Moorcroft designs of all time and has had a number of television appearances. For a Moorcroft tubeliner, fruit designs can be challenging, and certainly, the fig becomes a means of demonstrating excellence in the heritage skills of applying liquid clay slip by hand before being infiled with reddish-pink metallic oxides. Lime green and yellow tubelined colours are also used to add a three-dimensional vibrancy, with the fruit’s pips dotted one by one in tiny roundels of equal parity. Impossibly difficult. The shape of the fruit itself, the tear-drop silhouette that fills your hand with softness, works like the pomegranates featured in William Moorcroft’s famous Pomegranate designs of the 1920’s.