Chantilly Creamware Plates With Green Shell Edge, Set of Eight, French, Late 18th Century

Details

Description

Chantilly Creamware Plates with Green Shell Edge, Set of Eight, French, Late 18th Century
Circa 1790–1800

This set of eight … Read more Chantilly Creamware Plates with Green Shell Edge, Set of Eight, French, Late 18th Century
Circa 1790–1800

This set of eight French creamware (faïence fine) plates was made at Chantilly, north of Paris, in direct imitation of the green shell-edged tablewares then being exported in quantity from Leeds and Staffordshire. Each circular plate has a plain, shallow well and a broad flat rim, its gently scalloped edge molded with fine radiating lines and brushed in green so that the color feathers inward from the border. The pale cream body is covered in a clear, glossy lead glaze.

Marked Chantilly creamware is seldom seen; the Dictionary of National Biography stated in 1896 that no specimen of the ordinary ware made by the factory’s English owner, Christopher Potter, was known to survive. The closest published parallel, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, has the same green-edged rim and carries the same impressed name and the same impressed numeral 3 found on some of these plates.

As a set of eight the plates hang well as a group on a dining-room or kitchen wall, where the green edges read as a continuous rhythm, and sit equally well on a dresser or open shelves alongside English creamware and pearlware.

Dimensions
Diameter: 9¾ inches (24.8 cm), each
Height: 1 inch (2.5 cm)

Marks
Impressed CHANTILLY, partly struck on the example illustrated (the final letters …ILLY legible); some also impressed with the numeral 3

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good antique condition. One plate with a chip to the rim and one with a frit to the rim.

References
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, C.555-1909: plate of cream-colored earthenware painted in green, the wavy rim molded with a feather pattern, impressed CHANTILLY and 3, diameter 24.4 cm, described by the museum as made in imitation of Leeds earthenware

Musée du Louvre, Service de l’Histoire du Louvre: faïence fine soup plate with a green border band, excavated in the Cour Napoléon, marked “Chantilly P”

Patrice Valfré, C. Potter, le potier révolutionnaire et ses manufactures de Paris, Chantilly, Montereau… (Bagneaux-sur-Loing: Miss Teapot, 2012)

J. G. Alger, “Potter, Christopher (d. 1817),” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 46 (London, 1896)

Historical Context
The Chantilly manufactory, founded under the patronage of the Prince de Condé about 1730 and celebrated for its soft-paste porcelain, was in decline by the 1780s, squeezed between Sèvres and the flood of English creamware admitted under the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786. French potters answered with faïence fine of their own, and creamware production at Chantilly is generally said to have begun in 1786.

In 1792 the factory was bought by Christopher Potter (1750–1817), an English entrepreneur who had settled in Paris by 1789 and ran a pottery in the rue de Crussol. At Chantilly he was said to employ five hundred men and to produce nine thousand dozen plates a month; he was imprisoned as an English hostage in 1793, won one of the major prizes for white pottery at the Paris exhibition of 1798, and had given up all his factories except Montereau by 1802. Green-edged plates such as these, made by a French factory under English ownership to English models, are a tangible record of that brief Anglo-French chapter.

(Ref: NY11273-nirr) See less