Dutch Delft Blue & White Chinoiserie Punch Bowl With Floral Medallions Circa 1720

Details

Description

Dutch Delft Blue & White Chinoiserie Punch Bowl with Floral Medallions
Circa 1720

This Dutch Delft blue and white punch … Read more Dutch Delft Blue & White Chinoiserie Punch Bowl with Floral Medallions
Circa 1720

This Dutch Delft blue and white punch bowl is painted in a rich cobalt on the white tin-glazed ground with a chinoiserie design of floral medallions. Below the rim, a continuous band carries six large circular medallions, each painted with a flowering plant, alternating with six smaller panels reserved in a deep blue surround, each enclosing a pendant flower head above two stippled fruits. Beneath this main register, the swelling body is decorated with a series of twelve stylized flower heads with foliage, and the bowl stands on a plain flared foot. The interior is sparingly painted at the center with two flowers growing among three plants above a ground of horizontal strokes, encircled higher on the wall by an airy border of alternating dot clusters and circles.

At just over ten inches across, the bowl works well as a centerpiece on a dining or hall table, and it sits comfortably with other blue and white on a sideboard, bookshelf or mantel.

Dimensions:
Diameter: 10¼ inches (26 cm)
Height: 5¾ inches (14.6 cm)

Provenance:
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition:
Good condition, with minor chips to the underside of the foot and light glaze flaking to the rim, as usual for tin-glazed earthenware of this date.

Historical Context
Delftware is tin-glazed earthenware made in the city of Delft, at first in imitation of the Chinese porcelain imported in vast quantities by the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). When the civil wars that accompanied the fall of the Ming dynasty disrupted the porcelain trade in the mid-seventeenth century, the Delft potteries seized the market, perfecting an opaque white glaze and a cobalt palette that answered the European appetite for blue and white. Unable to make true hard-paste porcelain, the Delft painters developed their own idiom, a free European interpretation of Asian motifs, of which the medallion-and-flower decoration of this bowl is characteristic.

The industry reached its greatest extent around 1700, when more than thirty potteries were at work in the city, and this bowl dates from the years that followed, when more than twenty were still in production. Punch bowls were among the most sociable vessels of the eighteenth century: the mixing and serving of punch stood at the center of convivial gatherings, and a large, boldly decorated bowl was both a centerpiece and a mark of standing in a prosperous household.

(Ref: NY10792-umrx) See less