Dutch-decorated English Creamware Plate, Onse Live Vrouw Tot Kevelaar (Our Lady to Kevelaar), Circa 1765-85.

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Description

Dutch-Decorated English Creamware Plate
Onse Live Vrouw Tot Kevelaar (Our Lady of Kevelaer)

A rare and historically resonant creamware plate … Read more Dutch-Decorated English Creamware Plate
Onse Live Vrouw Tot Kevelaar (Our Lady of Kevelaer)

A rare and historically resonant creamware plate of deep-well form with a shaped and lobed rim, the plain English blank exported to Holland and there decorated in polychrome enamels with a devotional subject of exceptional interest. The border is painted with a continuous trailing vine of stylised flowers in iron-red and green, their centres picked out in yellow, on a white ground. The broad cavetto is left plain, defined by a red circular line, and the well contains a vibrant hand-painted scene centred on the venerated image of Our Lady of Kevelaer.

The central image depicts the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child enthroned on a raised plinth, both figures crowned and shown frontally in the rigid, hieratic manner of the original pilgrimage image — thickly robed figures beneath ornate mantle-shaped vestments richly decorated in red, gold, and white scrollwork. The Virgin holds a tall staff or sceptre in her right hand; the Child is held to her left side. Both figures are surrounded by radiant halos painted in iron-red. In the landscape behind, the low-lying Rhine plain is suggested by horizontal bands of green and blue, and the principal buildings of the Kevelaer shrine complex are identifiable to either side: to the left, the Chapel of the Candles (Kerzenkapelle) with its distinctive tower and adjacent structures; to the right, the hexagonal Gnadenkapelle (Chapel of Grace), shown with its characteristic dome and arcade. Rows of wayside crosses and small figures of pilgrims in red complete the background. Below the figures, a rectangular cartouche inscribed in Dutch capital letters reads: “ONSE LIVE VROUW / TOT KEVELAAR” (Our Lady of Kevelaer).

The painting is executed with the liveliness and directness typical of Dutch popular devotional ceramics, the palette centred on iron-red, turquoise-green, yellow-ochre, and white, with vigorous brushwork throughout. The style and iconography closely follow printed devotional images that circulated widely in the Netherlands and the Lower Rhine region from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.

Dimensions
• Diameter: 10 in. (25.4 cm)
• Height: 1¼ in. (3.2 cm)

Marks
Impressed numeral ‘4’ to the reverse.

Condition
Painting in excellent condition with bright, strong colours. Star-crack to the reverse; this does not penetrate through to the front.

Historical Context
The shrine at Kevelaer, a small town in the Kleve district of North Rhine-Westphalia near the Dutch border, has been one of the most important Catholic pilgrimage sites in north-western Europe since its foundation in 1642. According to tradition, a merchant named Hendrick Busman, halting to pray at a wayside crucifix during the Thirty Years’ War, heard a voice directing him to build a chapel there. His wife subsequently received a vision of the image they should install — a small copper-engraved print of Our Lady of Luxembourg, the ‘Consolatrix Afflictorum’ (Comforter of the Afflicted), which had first been venerated in Luxembourg since the early seventeenth century. The image was installed in a simple shrine in June 1642 and drew immediate crowds.

In 1654 the hexagonal Gnadenkapelle (Chapel of Grace) was built to enshrine it, and from the mid-seventeenth century a steady flood of pilgrims from the Netherlands and the German Rhineland ensured that Kevelaer became deeply embedded in popular Catholic devotion across the Low Countries. More than one million pilgrims continue to visit annually.

The venerated image at Kevelaer is a printed copperplate engraving, not a painted or sculpted figure, and in its original form shows the Virgin and Child in the closely robed, frontal manner associated with the Marian images of Luxembourg. The painted depiction on the present plate follows the conventional visual tradition established by devotional prints widely circulated from the shrine, in which the figures appear on a raised plinth amid a recognisable landscape of the pilgrimage precinct. The buildings depicted — the Gnadenkapelle and the Kerzenkapelle — are identifiable from early engravings of the site and would have been immediately legible to contemporary viewers as specific topographical references, confirming the plate’s function as a souvenir or votive object connected with the pilgrimage.

It was common practice during the second half of the eighteenth century for English potteries — particularly in Yorkshire and Staffordshire — to export plain creamware blanks to the Netherlands, where independent decorating workshops applied polychrome enamel subjects suited to Dutch and Flemish tastes. Religious, commemorative, and topographical subjects of local significance were among the most characteristic products of this trade, and pilgrimage plates of this type represent a particularly rare survival. The impressed numeral ‘4’ is consistent with marks recorded on creamware of this period and may denote a size designation or a thrower’s tally rather than a factory mark. No English factory attribution can be confirmed on present evidence.

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