Blue and White Porcelain Tulipière Flower Pyramids in the Dutch Delft Style, Pair

Details

Description

Blue and White Porcelain Tulipière Flower Pyramids in the Dutch Delft Style, Pair
Chinese, Modern

Each of these tulipières is … Read more Blue and White Porcelain Tulipière Flower Pyramids in the Dutch Delft Style, Pair
Chinese, Modern

Each of these tulipières is built in the tiered obelisk form of the Delft flower pyramids of the years around 1690. A square base on four bracket feet is painted on each side with an arched panel of a bird among flowering peony within a lambrequin border, and supports six diminishing square tiers, each with a tubular spout at every corner, twenty-four spouts in all, for single flower stems. The sides of the tiers are painted with scrolling peony and leaves in the Delft manner, the ledges between them with stiff-leaf and lambrequin borders, and each pyramid is surmounted by a baluster knop finial. Each is assembled from four separate interconnecting sections over a hollow central cavity that serves as a shared water reservoir. The decoration is in underglaze blue on a white ground throughout.

At better than two and a half feet high, a pair on this scale suits a chimneypiece, a hall table, or the two ends of a long sideboard, and reads as architecture in a room whether planted or left empty. With a single stem to each spout the two together carry forty-eight flowers.

Dimensions
Height: 31¼ inches (79.4 cm)
Base: 8¾ inches (22.2 cm) square

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good

References
Jan Daniël van Dam, Delffse Porceleyne: Dutch Delftware 1620–1850 (Waanders, Zwolle, 2004), for the seventeenth-century prototypes.
Chatsworth House Trust, The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth, exhibition, 15 March – 5 October 2025, for the Greek A factory flower pyramids at Chatsworth.

Historical Context
Flower pyramids, or tulipières, were made at Delft in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, stacked tiers of spouts for single stems of tulips and other prized cut flowers, and were the grandest objects the Delft potters produced. Their fashion is bound up with Queen Mary II, who brought her passion for Dutch delftware and for gardens to the English court on the accession of William and Mary in 1689 and commissioned pyramids from the Greek A factory of Adrianus Kocx for Het Loo and Hampton Court. The first Duke of Devonshire followed her example, and the set of Greek A pyramids made for him had reached Chatsworth by 1695, when payments were made for their carriage from London; they were among the treasures of the 2025 exhibition The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth.

The form has been revived in modern times for the decorator market, and pairs of this size in the Delft blue and white manner, made in China in porcelain rather than tin-glazed earthenware, answer the same purpose as the originals: a massed display of cut flowers, one stem to each spout.

(Ref: NY11257-naii) See less