English Porcelain Botanical Fruit Dessert Service, Attributed to Coalport Circa 1830

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Description

English Porcelain Botanical Fruit Dessert Service, Attributed to Coalport
Circa 1830

This eighteen-piece porcelain dessert service is attributed to John … Read more English Porcelain Botanical Fruit Dessert Service, Attributed to Coalport
Circa 1830

This eighteen-piece porcelain dessert service is attributed to John Rose’s Coalport factory in Shropshire, England, and was made around 1830, when the rococo revival was reshaping English dessert wares. Each piece has a scalloped rim molded in relief with C-scrolls and clusters of small flowers left in white, with a beaded inner edge. The broad border carries a soft gray ground overlaid with gilt scrollwork, flower heads and trailing leaves.

The centers are painted by hand with naturalistic studies of fruit, each a separate composition set with sprays of blossom and small wild flowers. The fruits include apples, pears, apricots, plums, cherries, strawberries, gooseberries and hazelnuts, and the oval dish shows a fruiting bramble with golden berries. The restrained gray and the rich gilding set off the color of the painted fruit.

The service comprises thirteen dessert plates, four two-handled square dishes and one two-handled oval dish.

The service is unmarked apart from the painted pattern number 2/535. Fractional pattern numbers of this kind were used by several English porcelain factories, notably Ridgway at Cauldon Place, Staffordshire, and Coalport, and services of this type have often been given to Ridgway. The number itself argues against Ridgway: at Cauldon Place the 2/ series was reserved for tea and breakfast wares, and a number as low as 2/535 falls around 1815–1820, before John Ridgway & Co. was formed in 1830 and before this molded shape was in use. Coalport’s fractional numbers are recorded as never running to more than three figures below the line and are often written at right angles to the footrim, exactly as here, and the factory made gray-and-gilt dessert wares with fruit centers within its 2/ series. The attribution to Coalport rests on this evidence; no marked piece of this exact shape has yet been traced.

A service of this size dresses a dinner for twelve with a plate in reserve, and the handled dishes suit fruit, cheese or petits fours. Off the table, the soft gray and gilt borders sit comfortably in traditional or pared-back rooms, and a group of plates hung on a dining room wall or ranged on a dresser shows the variety of the fruit painting to advantage.

Dimensions
Plates, diameter: 9 inches (22.9 cm)
Square dishes, width: 11 inches (27.9 cm)
Oval dish, width: 11¾ inches (29.8 cm)

Marks
Painted fractional pattern number 2/535 beside the footrim.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good antique condition; one plate with a hairline crack.

Historical Context
John Rose (1772–1841) founded the Coalport factory in the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire, in 1795, took over the nearby Caughley works in 1799 and closed it in 1814, moving its equipment to Coalport. In 1820 he received the Society of Arts gold medal for a leadless feldspathic glaze, and in the early 1820s he acquired molds from the Swansea and Nantgarw factories. Through the 1820s and 1830s Coalport was among the leading English makers of richly gilt dessert services in the revived rococo taste.

Dessert was the last and most ornamental course of a formal dinner, served after the cloth was drawn, and its porcelain was chosen for display as much as for use. Services painted with fruit and flowers reflected the period’s enthusiasm for horticulture, each plate offering a fresh study for guests to admire.

(Ref: NY10607-VM) See less