Platter

This black and white transfer-printed earthenware platter made by the Staffordshire firm of William Ridgway & Co. features a view of the United States Capitol building in Washington, District of Columbia. The view belongs to a series of approximately sixteen American views commonly known as "American Scenery" produced for the United States export market beginning in the 1840s. The series records important nineteenth-century American public buildings, towns and scenery. As a symbol of American political power with obvious patriotic appeal to American consumers the Capitol was among the period's more popular subjects for transfer-printed export wares. Designed and constructed in several stages from 1793 to 1830 by Philadelphia architects William Thornton (1764–1828) and Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820) and Boston architect Charles Bulfinch (1763–1844), the Capitol was also admired as a monumental example of American neoclassical architecture. Ridgway's view captures the building when it was still a work in progress with the final central dome designed by Philadelphia architect Thomas Ustick Walter (1804–1887) to be added later from 1855 to 1865.