1715, BRISTOL OR LONDON

Details

AN ENGLISH DELFT DATED POLYCHROME FLARED DEEP BOWL
1715, BRISTOL OR LONDON
The interior painted in green, yellow and iron-red with two figures dancing, smoking and drinking by a table beneath a draped arch within a circular blue scroll surround, the exterior with a continuous scene of figures at various pursuits and at discussion in a continuous hilly wooded landscape with birds and a windmill and the initials GB/1715, on a short spreading foot with scroll-ornament
11¼ in. (28.5 cm.) diam.

Provenance

Anonymous sale; Christie's, South Kensington, 2 October 1997, lot 209.

Literature

Leslie B. Grigsby, The Longridge Catalogue, Vol. II, D307.
Leslie B. Grigsby, 'Dated English Delftware and Slipware in the Longridge Collection', The Magazine Antiques, June 1999, pp. 881-882, pls. 12, 12a.

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

The figures drinking and smoking to the interior are very similar to those seen on Chinese export 'South Sea Bubble' plates of the early 18th century. These were made to satirise the South Sea Bubble which burst in 1720, by warning Dutch speculators not to set up a similar company in Holland and ridiculing the shareholders of The Company of the Indies. See D. Howard and J. Ayres, China for the West, London, 1978, Vol. I, pp. 234-5. Though these plates post-date the present bowl, it is likely that these Commedia dell'Arte figures are derived from an earlier, as yet unidentified print source.

This bowl is not recorded by Lipski and Archer.

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