Touted in the auction catalogue as one of Australia’s ‘Top 5 pot lids’, a rare Victorian toothpaste pot lid slid into Number 1 position when it was knocked down for $41,940 (including buyer’s premium) at Graham Lancaster Auctions in Queensland a few days ago, setting a new world record for an Australian pot lid.
“The pot lid carried a presale estimate of $15,000 to $20,000 and attracted strong worldwide interest following a targeted promotional campaign,” said Graham, “and the result was a highlight of our latest online Antique Bottle and Stoneware Auction.”
The pot lid in question, which featured a detailed pictorial of a Victorian chemist shop, was produced for J. W. Allison, a Sydney chemist and pharmacist active in the late 19th century. By the mid-1880s, Allison was trading under his own name at 72 William Street, Sydney, and was a registered member of the Pharmaceutical Society of New South Wales.
Most Australian-branded pot lids were made in the UK and shipped blank to the Australian chemist, who then added his own contents – sometimes made by the chemist himself and sometimes bought from an Australian manufacturer – and his own branding. So to qualify as being Australian, the pot lid is simply one branded with the name of an Australian town, chemist or company. Because it was usually more economical for the chemist to import the filled and branded pots from the UK, only a small percentage of the thousands of pharmacies operating in Australia in the late 1800s sold their products in personally branded pots.
The lids were assigned to plain earthenware pots and those that were sold in Australia mostly contained household commodities such as toothpaste, cold cream, healing ointments, meat and fish paste and hair pomade. The contents were sealed either by using a paper label around the base and lid, or with the Toogood patent, which used matching grooves on opposite sides of the lid and base, with string passed through the grooves to keep the lid on.
Some lids had paper labels adhered onto the glaze, but these were easily destroyed by the time the contents of the pot had been used and today are quite rare. The underglaze printing could survive any kind of treatment. However, any gilt overglaze decoration tended to deteriorate and disappear with use.
Practically every small chemist made his own toothpaste and had his own personalised printed lids. The two most popular types of toothpaste lids are for areca nut and cherry toothpaste. Oddly, both were made to the same formula, i.e. with areca nut flavouring, but the cherry toothpaste was cherry-coloured by the addition of carmine. Nothing was added to give a cherry flavour, the description ‘cherry’ being applied merely due to the colour of the paste. Although the areca nut and cherry colouring gave added inspiration for pot lid design, it’s doubtful that many of the toothpaste users were aware that areca nuts were more commonly used as a worming agent.
Some Australian pot lids used local fauna for their decoration, including depictions of parrots, owls, emus, cockatoos, crows and swans. Melbourne’s gold rush in the latter part of the 1800s attracted numerous prospectors cashed up from recent successes in the Californian goldfields. Local proprietors took advantage of these well-funded customers and invested heavily in colourfully decorated containers and eye-catching artwork. This explains why Australia has many of the world’s most colourful and detailed transfer lids.
It may also now lay claim to the world record not just for an Australian pot lid at auction, but for ANY pot lid at auction (to be confirmed).
Additional information from Antiques & Collectables for Pleasure & Profit, Issue 50, December 2013, George and Greg Dean.
