Pair of Large English Creamware Chinoiserie Dishes, Circa 1780

Details

Description

English Creamware Chinoiserie Dishes, Pair of Large Enameled Plates with Figures Beneath a Parasol
England, Probably Staffordshire or Yorkshire, Circa … Read more English Creamware Chinoiserie Dishes, Pair of Large Enameled Plates with Figures Beneath a Parasol
England, Probably Staffordshire or Yorkshire, Circa 1775–1785

This pair of large English creamware dishes has a shaped rim with a slightly molded raised edge, and each is painted in the well with a chinoiserie scene in overglaze enamel colors: a lady seated in a wooden ladder-back chair, wrapped in a manganese shawl over an iron-red skirt, attended by two companions in yellow jackets, one holding a parasol above her on a long pole, the other, in a black hat with a yellow brim and trailing red plume, offering a shallow dish of red fruit. The group is set between sprays of iron-red grasses on a green ground, with flights of birds above and, below, two small iron-red forms resting on green washes of water. Scattered flowering sprigs in iron-red, green and manganese are dispersed across the well and rim of each, with a larger iron-red flower spray placed directly above the figures. The two dishes follow the same design freehand and differ in small details — a line of green dots runs across the foreground of one and is omitted on the other — as one expects of enamel painting of this date.

Dishes of this size were the workhorses of a creamware dinner service, and survivors in pairs are far scarcer than the single plates.

At nearly thirteen inches across, the pair reads as a pair of pictures rather than as tableware. Hung together above a chest or a chimneypiece, or stood on plate stands at either end of a sideboard or a dresser shelf, they bring a quiet green, red and cream palette that sits easily with painted furniture, mahogany and a blue-and-white collection.

Dimensions
Diameter: 12¾ inches (32.4 cm)
Height: 1¼ inches (3.2 cm)

Marks
Unmarked.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good antique condition. Both dishes have scattered small glaze frits and minor chips along the shaped rim edge, a number of them slightly darkened with age, as is usual with creamware of this date and a consequence of the raised molded edge standing proud of the rim. No cracks and no restoration.

Historical Context
Creamware, the refined cream-colored earthenware developed in Staffordshire around 1750 and brought to commercial success by Josiah Wedgwood from the early 1760s, displaced both delftware and much imported porcelain from English tables within a generation. Queen’s Ware, the name Wedgwood adopted after Queen Charlotte’s patronage in 1765, belongs properly to his own product rather than to creamware at large, although the trade has long used it loosely.

Most creamware was sold plain or transfer-printed, and hand enameling was charged as a costly extra, so a painted service of this kind was a conspicuously fashionable purchase. Much of that painting was done away from the potbank by independent enamelers — Robinson and Rhodes in Leeds, whose shop the Victoria and Albert Museum records on a tea canister of about 1770 to 1780, and David Rhodes himself, who moved south to run Wedgwood’s Chelsea decorating studio around 1770. Their chinoiserie came at second and third hand, from Chinese export porcelain and from pattern books such as Robert Sayer’s Ladies Amusement, and the scene here, with its parasol, its plumed hat and its perfectly European chair, is the East as the Georgian imagination furnished it.

(Ref: NY10447-lamx) See less