A RARE DATED AND INITIALLED PUNCHBOWL

CIRCA 1760

Details

A RARE DATED AND INITIALLED PUNCHBOWL
Circa 1760
The exterior painted in blue enamel with a continuous countryside scene showing an English couple strolling to a walled church visible at the side, their twelve children ranged in pairs of descending size behind them, a village in the distance between leafy trees, the interior finely painted in colors with a hen and her twelve chicks, some huddled in her feathers and others drinking from a basin in the foreground, all within exuberant scrollwork centered by the gilt monogram WBM and the date 1759, the base inscribed FROYLE in black
15 5/8in. (39.7cm.) diam.

Exhibited

London, Christie's, Fanfare for Europe, 1973, no. 356.

Lot Essay

One of a pair of unique punchbowls ordered from China as copies of a Bristol delft punchbowl now in the collection of the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and illustrated by F. Britton, English Delftware in the Bristol Collection, London 1982. The Chinese export bowls differ from the Bristol example only in the inscriptions on their bases, this bowl reading FROYLE, a village in Hampshire, and its once-companion GODALMING, a village in Surrey. Mr. Britton, having perused parish registers for a 1759 marriage with the bowls' initials, concludes that they may have been commissioned by the Draper family of Bristol. Daniel Draper served in the East India Company from 1748 to 1782, when he was a senior member of the Council at Bombay.