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Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906) Lady Burdett-Coutts was one of the great Victorian philanthropists, who spent her life devoted to the poor in Britain and abroad. During her lifetime, she gave away an estimated £3-£4 million of the Coutts banking fortune which she inherited from her grandfather. She was a keen collector of paintings, manuscripts, china and antique books, with agents across the Middle East, and was a frequent visitor at the auction rooms. As well as her work on behalf of the London poor, she was a passionate supporter of the Turks, organising a relief campaign on behalf of the Turkish peasants after the 1877 Russo-Turkish war. This led Abdul Hamid, the Sultan of Turkey, to confer on the Baroness the Diamond Star of the Order of the Medjidiyeh. At the age of 66, she forfeited much of her fortune by marrying the 29 year old American William Bartlett; the terms of her inheritance forbade her from marrying a foreigner. He assisted her philanthropic ventures, travelling to Turkey and Ireland to administer her relief work, and carried on with the work after her death in 1906. When her husband died in 1922, Christie's held a three-day sale of her collection, although this particular dish does not appear.

AN IZNIK POTTERY DISH

OTTOMAN TURKEY, CIRCA 1666

Details

AN IZNIK POTTERY DISH
OTTOMAN TURKEY, CIRCA 1666
With sloping rim and short foot, the white interior painted in cobalt-blue, green, bole-red and black, depicting a central stylized kiosk with pitched roof and four pinnacles, flanked by two hyacinth sprays, the border with alternating paired red leaves and green flowerheads, traces of gilding in some parts, chips to rim, foot drilled
11¾in. (29.8cm.) diam.

Provenance

Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, sold Sotheby's, London, 22 October 1992, lot 161

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

This and the following lot are two from about ten known examples of this design. One other is in the Sadberk Hanim Museum, Istanbul (Laure Soustiel: Splendeurs de la céramique ottomane, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2000, no.56, p.95). Two further examples are in the British Museum and the Benaki Museum, each of which bears the date 1666. John Carswell has sugggested that the building might be a representation of a Turkish Moslem shrine, the pinnacles representing minarets. Three of the dishes however have Greek inscriptions indicating that, if there is any religious intent, it would equally likely be Christian than Moslem. It is also interesting to note what appears to be a similar pavilion that appears in a roundel on a blue and white dish in the Sadberk Hanim Museum (Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby: Iznik, the Potttery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, pl.48, p.55). If the similarity is not fortuitous, it shows that the pinnacles or minarets seen here originated as cypress trees.

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