Coalport Porcelain Botanical Lozenge Dishes, Pair of Cobalt Blue and Gilt Dessert Dishes With Garden Flowers

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Description

Coalport Porcelain Botanical Lozenge Dishes, Pair of Cobalt Blue and Gilt Dessert Dishes with Garden Flowers
English, Coalport, John Rose … Read more Coalport Porcelain Botanical Lozenge Dishes, Pair of Cobalt Blue and Gilt Dessert Dishes with Garden Flowers
English, Coalport, John Rose & Co., Circa 1820

This pair of dessert dishes is painted at the center with groups of garden flowers within a border of underglaze cobalt blue gilded with a trailing fruiting grapevine of leaves, tendrils and small bunches. Each dish is of shaped lozenge form drawn to a point at either end, the rim boldly gadrooned and gilt and crested at intervals with molded shell-and-scroll cartouches picked out in gold, while a wavy gilt line follows the inner edge of the blue band and encircles the white well.

One dish is painted with a double iron-red ranunculus beside a large magenta chrysanthemum and a smaller purple aster on a leafy stem, a single red bud hanging below the group on a slender stalk. The other bears a full pink cabbage rose with two buds, accompanied by a pink chrysanthemum and a smaller pink aster among rose foliage. Both groups are freely composed and painted with soft modeling, turned leaves and fine stems in the naturalistic manner of Regency flower painting, and neither repeats the other.

The dishes come from the same dessert service as the set of twelve botanical plates in stock, sharing the gadrooned and crested rim, the underglaze blue ground and the gilt fruiting grapevine. Lozenge dishes, sometimes described simply as shaped oval dishes, were set about the table with the other serving shapes around the raised centerpiece. A dessert service of this period usually held only two or four of each serving shape against a dozen or more plates, so dishes of this form are considerably scarcer than the plates themselves, and a matched pair scarcer still.

The pair is well suited to flanking a centerpiece on a dining table or sideboard, or to hanging symmetrically on either side of a mirror, doorway or overmantel. The deep cobalt and gold also sit comfortably in a glazed cabinet with other Regency porcelain, and the dishes can be offered together with the twelve matching plates for a fuller display.

Dimensions
Length: 11¼ inches (28.6 cm)
Width: 8¼ inches (21.0 cm)
Height: 1¾ inches (4.4 cm)

Marks
Unmarked, apart from an impressed numeral, 6 or 9 depending on orientation, on the underside of each dish. No pattern number is visible. Coalport of this date is characteristically unmarked.

Provenance
Canadian Collection
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge, Inc.

Condition
No breaks or repairs. One dish with some brown surface discoloration to the well and reverse, as seen in the photographs.

References
Geoffrey A. Godden, Coalport and Coalbrookdale Porcelains (Antique Collectors’ Club, revised edition 1981)
Michael Messenger, Coalport 1795–1926 (Antique Collectors’ Club, 1995)

Historical Context
A Regency dessert service was built from a fixed vocabulary of forms — plates, lozenge, oval and square dishes, shell dishes, sauce tureens and a raised centerpiece — set out together for the last and most decorative course of the meal, and the serving dishes carried the boldest molding and the largest painted reserves. John Rose’s works at Coalport, on the north bank of the Severn in Shropshire a short way downstream of Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale, had absorbed the Caughley factory in 1799 and the neighboring works of Anstice, Horton & Rose in 1814, and in 1820 Rose received the Society of Arts gold medal for a leadless feldspar glaze. Cobalt-ground dessert services with gilt borders and painted flowers were among the factory’s most characteristic luxury wares of the decade.

(Ref: NY11243-cui) See less