1708, PROBABLY LONDON

Details

A MASSIVE ENGLISH DELFT DATED BLUE AND WHITE WASSAIL BOWL AND TIERED COVER
1708, PROBABLY LONDON
In four sections, the bowl's interior painted with Bacchus astride a barrel and garlanded with grapes within an border of luxriant vine, the exterior painted in the manner of Antonio Tempesta with a hunting scene with equestrian figures and with a stag being brought down by hounds before a building with two domed bell-towers in a continuous wooded landscape, on a stepped domed foot with bands of scroll, flowerhead and loop-ornament, the first domed cover with a band of flowerheads surrounded by a moulded coronet with jewels and a serrated rim surmounted by a smaller coronet cover with a campana-shaped bowl and cover forming the finial, the interior of the small bowl with the initials E.B./1708
25¼ in. (64 cm.) high (4)

Provenance

The Beauchamp Family, Langley Hall, Norfolk (sold circa 1953).
Anonymous sale; Phillips, London, 7 June 1989, lot 240.

Literature

Leslie B. Grigsby, The Longridge Catalogue, Vol. II, D306.
Leslie B. Grigsby, 'Dated Longridge Delft and Slipware' The Magazine Antiques, 155, June 1999, pp. 876-877, pls. 1, 1A.

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.

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Lot Essay

No similar examples of such astonishing proportions appear to be known. However, dated footed bowls and bowls with single covers are recorded by Lipski and Archer ranging in date from 1693 to 1727, but none on such a lavish scale or with the same decoration as the present example. A dated posset-pot of 1703, with the arms of the Brewers' Company and a plate of 1708 both have similar elements of border pattern. See Louis L. Lipski and Michael Archer, Dated English Delftware, London 1984, p. 213, no. 944 and p. 79, no. 252. See also the punch bowl of a similar form, named for Sir Thomas Bootle and made to commemorate his election as MP for Liverpool in 1724, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, illustrated by Julia McKeown, British Ceramics, Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Collecting at Rode, London, 2006, pp. 36-37, fig. 26.

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