Description:
One of eleven circular white porcelain dessert plate decorated with a large floral bouquet in pink, rose, green, orange, and yellow in the center of the well, and four floral sprays around the curvature or booge, and four on the gilt-edged rim. In the early 19th century, French porcelain was considered more elegant, refined and desirable than its English or Chinese competitors. These dessert plates come from a more extensive set of French porcelain, which descended in the family of Timothy Dwight V (1778-1844), son Timothy Dwight IV (1752-1817), the eighth president of Yale College (1795-1817). Timothy Dwight V lived in New Haven, Connecticut, where he became a wealthy hardware merchant. In 1809, he married Clarissa Strong (1783-1855), the daughter of Massachusetts governor Caleb Strong (1745-1819), uniting two prominent New England families. The Dwight Professorship of Didactic Theology at Yale was named for him, and he financially supported the chair for the remainder of his life. Timothy V and Clarissa's son, Timothy Dwight VI (1811-1895) married Lucy Starr Olmstead (1816-1876) of Moreau, NY, in 1842, and was a merchant in New Haven; later a manufacturer of tool and coach lace in Seymour, Connecticut and cars in Chicago; spent many years in Beloit, Wisconsin; and finally a manufacturer of paper bags in Chicago, Illinois, where he and his family moved in 1870. According to Dwight family tradition, the donor's father told him that the plates belonged to to his grandfather, Timothy VI when Timothy VI was living in New Haven before 1850 and that they had survived the great Chicago fire of 1871.
Subjects:
Pottery; Enamel and enameling; glaze (coating by location); polychrome; Porcelain Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2008.10.14 |
