Description:
English delft bowl, molded with a twenty flutes and a scalloped edge, decorated in blue, yellow, green, purple, and white. Although fluted bowls appeared in English silver as early as 1642, it is a rare form in English delftware. The form was probably inspired by Asian porcelain prototypes such as fluted porcelain bowls created by Japanese potters in the late 17th century for export. These so-called chrysanthemum bowls, symbolizing autumn, were made in the shape of a sixteen-petal blossom. The interior decoration is most unusual, with its combination of a bianco-sopra-bianco and blue patterns of flowers and tendrils. The exterior has a chinoiserie landscape scene in blue, yellow, green, and purple with a Chinese figure pointing with both hands, which can be found on a chimney vase at Colonial Williamsburg and on a punch bowl dated 1755. This combination of interior bianco and exterior chinoiserie decoration is found on a large group of bowls, many with a 1755 date. This typical London-designed scene shows the man wearing a green coat and yellow hat and pants and pointing to a blue and yellow building, trees, and distant hills; he is standing in front of a running fence with a cracked ice pattern, pine trees, and tall yellow rocks. This bowl could have served a variety of foods at the table, but it is possible that it was used for salad, which were becoming increasingly popular by the late seventeenth century. In the 1699 publication of John Evelyn's "Acetaria A Discourse of Sallets", (London, 1699), he urged that the only salad bowl to be contemplated was "of Porcelane, or of Holland-Delft-Ware...Pewter or even Silver, not at all so well agreeing with Oyl and Vinegar, which leave their Several Tinctures." In late eighteenth-century earthenware pattern books, fluted bowls like this example are often designated as "sallad bowls." Bianco-sopra-bianco is decorative form where a painted design in a brilliant white pigment stands out against a tinted ground. Late fifteenth-century Italian potters first developed this technique, called 'bianchetto', but its revival in the eighteenth century is probably connected to decorated Chinese export porcelains. Underglaze carved decoration (known as 'an hua') and overglaze white enameling on Chinese porcelains directly inspired their imitation on delftwares. The bianco sopra bianco technique first appeared in Europe on Italian maiolica of the late 15th or early 16th century but it was not long lived and disappeared. The bianco technique was first revived at the Swedish factory of Rörstrand sometime before 1745, and seems likely that the decorative technique was brought to England by Magnus Lundberg, a Swedish potter who had worked at the Rörstrand factory. Lundberg eventually settled in Bristol around 1750 to become a pot-painter and master at the Richard Frank's Redcliff Back pottery.
Subjects:
Pottery; glaze (coating by location) Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+58.137.2 |
