18th Century Butter Churns
Last updated: Jan 5, 2024
For detailed thoughts on churns and butter production, read the section on the Butter and Cheeſe Dairy (“The beſt Method of making Butter and Cheeſe, with ſeveral curious Particulars containing the whole Management of the Dairy”) in The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750). Pehr Kalm has additional observations on butter production in his Account of His Visit to England (1748).
A page on churns from the 13th-16th centuries can be found elsewhere on this site.
- Met 17.190.1777, a French faience butter churn, 1730
- Roman peasant woman with a butter churn on her head by Jean-Étienne Liotard, c. 1737
- Butter and The Dairy in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 1752; also illustrations of butter churns in vols 1 and 6 in the 1762 edition
- The Butter Churner, 1754
- Rural Life: The Housewife’s Employment
- La petite beurrière by François Boucher (also here)
- Man churning butter, c. 1777-1779
- Illustration of a woman in a courtyard from A Pretty Book of Pictures, 1779
- Cours complet d’Agriculture by Jean-François Rozier, 1781
- Colonial Williamsburg 1973-345,A&B, a creamware butter churn, Staffordshire, c. 1785
- Tall butter churn from 18th century New England
- Edinburgh Milkmaid with Butter Churn by David Allan, c. 1785-1795
- Morning, c. 1790
- A woman churning by James Ward
- The Milkmaid and the Snail, c. 1790
- Women churning butter by Johann Karl Müllener, c. 1790-1795
- John Bull’s Progress, 1793
- The Butter Churner by Henry Robert Morland
- Morning by Francis Wheatley, 1799
- Willis Henry Nov 16, 2013, Lot 7, a tall New England butter churn, 18th century
- Old hunchbacked woman with a butter churn by Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki