9 - ‘NOBODY’: London, 1675

Summary

Tin-Blazed earthenware painted in high-temperature colours and inscribed ‘M/RM/1675’ n the base. Height 23.3 cm. 0.1433–1928.

Free-standing ceramic models of humans or animals were rarely made in England before the second half of the seventeenth century. This quaint little man is one of the earliest made in delftware. He represents Nobody, that conveniently invisible person who for centuries has been blamed for careless breakages and other petty misdemeanours. By the late sixteenth century he was envisaged as a bodiless man whose head and arms projected from voluminous breeches. Just such a figure was illustrated on the title page of Nobody and Somebody, a play published in London in 1606. Although fashions changed, this image of Nobody persisted, and the delftware figure of 1675 is very like the earlier illustration, except that he holds a pipe. This reflects the fact that by the mid-seventeenth century the English had become a nation of pipe smokers.

Two more delftware Nobodies have survived: one, dated 1682, at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, the other in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where there is also a Chinese porcelain version. The last two have hat-shaped covers and presumably the others had them when new. The figures are hollow, and it has been suggested that they were tobacco jars. This seems unlikely because it would have been difficult to extract tobacco through the narrow opening in their head.