Flight & Barr Worcester Porcelain Botanical Dessert Plate, Circa 1792–1804

Details

Description

Flight & Barr Worcester Porcelain Botanical Dessert Plate, Circa 1792–1804

Two flame-red poppies, their petals shredded into a fringe around … Read more Flight & Barr Worcester Porcelain Botanical Dessert Plate, Circa 1792–1804

Two flame-red poppies, their petals shredded into a fringe around a pale seed head, anchor the border of this Flight & Barr Worcester porcelain dessert plate, painted at the Royal Porcelain Works in the last years of the eighteenth century. Between them a full double yellow flower, probably a ranunculus or globe flower, alternates with a small pink flowering plant with two open blooms and a cluster of round buds, all on gray-green foliage against the clean white porcelain. The lobed rim is edged in gilt, a gilt line rings the well, and the center is left white apart from a single sprig of purple flowers with yellow anthers.

The poppy is the double fringed garden form that eighteenth-century gardeners called the carnation poppy, and the painting has the close observation of a botanical plate, down to the bristly stems and the capsule at the flower’s heart. The reverse carries the factory’s puce script mark beneath a crown, reading Flight & Barr, Worcester, Manufacturers to their Majesties, together with the incised B of the 1792–1804 partnership, so the plate can be placed with confidence in the years just after George III granted the factory its Royal Warrant.

At 7 5/8 inches this is a plate to live with rather than store. Stand it on a small easel among garden books on a library shelf, hang it in a grouping of antique flower plates in a hallway or above a bathroom basin, or let it carry the after-dinner cheese on a table of plain white china where the red poppies will do all the work. It sits as happily in a fresh, pared-back scheme as in a room full of chintz.

Dimensions:
Diameter: 7 5/8 inches (19.4 cm)
Height: 1/2 inch (1.3 cm)

Marks:
Painted in puce script beneath a crown: “Flight & Barr / Worcester / Manufacturers to their Majesties,” the last line abbreviated, with a further script letter, read as “N,” below. Incised “B,” the so-called scratch B used at Worcester throughout the Flight & Barr partnership, 1792–1804.

Provenance:
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge See less