Description:
English delft octagonal plate decorated with an abstract blue and purple chinoiserie scene of a Chinese scholar seating in a rocky and mossy landscape in the shallow flat well and the four miniature Chinese scholars around the flat rim. This rim decoration is a rare and unusual feature. The slightly warped plate has a white tin glaze, which is pinkish in color, typical of 17th-century London ware. The Frenchs thought that this plate, which was purchased from Jane Loring and Floris Cummings of Greenfield, Massachusetts, was probably New England-owned delft.This was one of the most popular designs thoughout England, Holland, and Germany in the last quarter of the 17th century as English, Dutch, and German potters began to copy Chinese decorative styles, realizing that they could imitate Chinese blue and white procelains. On Ming Transitional hard paste porcelain (early to mid-seventeenth century), figures of this type represented scholars. On English and Continental tin-glazed earthenware dishes such figures often are referred to as "seated Chinese scholar" or, more specifically, "Chinese scholar among grasses" or "Chinese scholar among rocks." Some Western imitations are so highly stylized that it is difficult to recognize the figures. Dates on English "seated Chinese scholar" plates primarily are from the 1680s. The plate shown here illustrates a decorative style called trek, copied from Dutch tin glaze, for which design outlines were executed in purple or dark blue and then filled in corresponding washes of color. Blue-decorated octagonal and circular English "seated Chinese scholar" plates are more common than those in green and purple, purple and yellow, or blue and yellow, and may have been inspired by German faience. "Seated Chinese scholar" delftware wasters and other fragments have been excavated at several London sites.
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+95.029.3 |
