The border is decorated in blue and white with thick brush strokes in a late Ming kraak style associated with the Southwark productions. A charger with a similar border is illustrated on the front cover of Early English Delftware from London and Virginia, by Ivor Noel Hume. The tulip in the centre is painted in ochre and green; in a fashion that became popular in English delftware of the seventeenth century.

It is extremely unusual to find a tulip charger that one can date quite this early. Our dish is the only instance we have found of such a design being combined with this type of Southwark border, the tulip designs that follow are usually contained within blue dash borders and date to the second half of the seventeenth century.

One earlier dish in the Fitzwilliam Museum dated 1628 has a design of scrolling tulips, and other flowers.[i] Although earlier the 1628 not so obviously part of the tradition of tulip chargers that followed as ours is.

[i] Lipski & Archer 1984 and Archer 2013

Condition:
Long crack across ¾ of body; rivetted at the reverse

References:

Hume 1977
Ivor Noel Hume, Early English Delftware from London and Virginia, (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1977), See page 46, footnotes 11 and 13

Lipski & Archer 1984
Louis L. Lipski and Michael Archer, Dated English Delftware, London: Sotheby Publications (1984)

Archer 2013
Michael Archer, Delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013)

SOLD