Description:
Circular dish decorated in underglaze cobalt blue enamel in a style often called “kraak” porcelain, which refers to the Portuguese ships called carracks that carried this porcelain to the west, with a slightly flattened rim with a slope and a circular well. The Dutch often imported many of these dishes to decorate their their interiors. The plate is encircled around the rim with alternating reserves of Taoist and/or Buddhist symbols (perhaps an auspicious symbol?)interspersed between bound scrolls - one of these symbols is the peach of immortality - a fruit which appears only every 1000 years and to eat it confers immortality; the center of the well has an aquatic landscape of rocks, reeds, and weeds, and a cricket or grasshopper on a rocky outcropping (a cricket was generally a symbol of good luck). The reverse of the dish is decorated with underglaze cobalt blue enamel in a swirling stylized floral design, and the footrim is wiped clean of glaze. This dish is thin in body; this example has some but not all of the typical characteristics of kraak porcelain: there no evidence of chatter marks near the footrim (where excess clay would have been removed by a tool as the wheel turned), the body is not particularly thin, there are no glaze losses to the edges of the rim, the ceramic body itself is not very coarse or crude in manufacture, nor is there sand or grit sticking to the foot rim. The piece is in excellent condition with a short (1/2" long) hairline crack extending from the rim toward the center of the dish at approx. 12 o'clock.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2011.11 |
