In 1880, Charles Mortimer Odell joined forces with Henry and Walter Booth, two brothers from Staffordshire, an important pottery-making region in England. The new firm had as many as 90 employees, many of whom were decorators. Like a four-sided freestanding painting, this slab vase is ornamented with picturesque landscape imagery. A thin clay paste called barbotine was easily worked into a textural decoration resembling oil paint on canvas and then covered with a clear glaze. This technique, which resulted in a surface quite different from the smoothly enameled surfaces of conventional porcelains, derived from French pottery. Such works were sometimes called “Limoges” style wares after the porcelain factories near the city of Limoges in France.