Wedgwood Creamware Botanical Specimen Plate With Pink Flowers and Brown Printed Border Dated 1862

Details

Description

Wedgwood Creamware Botanical Specimen Plate with Pink Flowers and Brown Printed Border
Dated 1862

This Wedgwood creamware plate is painted … Read more Wedgwood Creamware Botanical Specimen Plate with Pink Flowers and Brown Printed Border
Dated 1862

This Wedgwood creamware plate is painted in the central well with a botanical specimen, a slender flowering plant shown as a naturalist would draw it, with two open flowers and two opening buds rising on wiry stems from a tuft of narrow, pointed leaves. The four-lobed flowers are shaded from deep rose-pink at the tips to a creamy yellow at the center, where the throat of each is delicately fringed, and each emerges from a long green calyx touched with brown. The plant is not named on the plate; the four-lobed flowers with fringed throats and the narrow paired leaves suggest a member of the gentian family.

The specimen is painted in enamels directly onto the warm cream-colored ground and is framed by a border printed in brown: an outer arcade of small repeating domes with a stylized leaf sprig between each, and, around the well, a continuous brown band overlaid with a lighter wavy line. A narrow line finishes the edge of the rim.

With its warm cream ground and restrained brown border, the plate sits easily among English creamware, botanical prints and other flower-painted ceramics. It may be hung singly or as part of a group of botanical plates, or displayed on a stand in a bookcase or cabinet.

Dimensions
Diameter: 9⅛ inches (23.2 cm)
Height: ½ inch (1.3 cm)

Marks
Impressed "WEDGWOOD", an impressed three-letter date code for 1862 and a separate impressed "M"; a painter's mark in brown enamel.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good condition and well preserved, with fine crazing to the glaze.

References
Robin Reilly, Wedgwood: The New Illustrated Dictionary (Antique Collectors' Club, 1995), for the factory's botanical patterns and the impressed date-letter system.
David Buten, Wedgwood Guide to Marks and Dating (Buten Museum of Wedgwood, 1976).
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: Wedgwood "Brown Water Lily" plate, with the museum's account of the introduction of botanical patterns at Etruria.

Historical Context
The single botanical specimen, drawn with a naturalist's precision and set alone on a plain ground, was established on English ceramics between about 1790 and 1820 by Derby, Worcester and Spode, whose painters copied the plates of William Curtis's Botanical Magazine. Wedgwood had its own part in that history: the factory's first botanical patterns were introduced at Etruria between about 1806 and 1810 under John Wedgwood (1766–1844), eldest son of the first Josiah and a founder of the Horticultural Society, and were given up after he withdrew from the firm in 1812. This plate shows the taste revived half a century later for the mid-Victorian public, whose enthusiasm for botany, gardening and flower collecting made dessert services with a different flower on every plate fashionable once again.

The body is creamware, the refined cream-colored earthenware that Josiah Wedgwood perfected in the 1760s and named Queen's Ware, and which the factory never ceased to make. From 1860 Wedgwood impressed its wares with a three-letter code in which the first letter stands for the month, the second for the potter and the third for the year of manufacture, so that pieces of this period can be dated to the year.

(Ref: NY10508-nrrx) See less