Painted in blue, yellow and red with a fully rigged three-masted merchant ship flying Dutch flags and inscribed “De Catarÿna & Liedewij. Gerret Salm 1756”, the exterior with landscape decoration.

Numerous plates and punch bowls with merchant ships of the 1750s and 1760s are recorded (for instance one dated 1752 with similar internal borders, Lipski & Archer 1984, no. 1135, p.267). They were a speciality of Liverpool and Bristol potters and frequently record the name of the ship and its captain who would have commissioned it.

Ours is unusual in having the name of a Dutch merchant ship and its captain Gerret Salm, no doubt celebrating a successful enterprise. Others are known with Scandinavian inscriptions including one signed by Magnus Lundberg who was recorded as a china painter at Rörstrand in Sweden and subsequently became a master of a potworks in Bristol.

Interestingly we found our example in Hamburg, another of the Hanseatic ports engaged in the Baltic and North Sea trade. 

Condition:
Chips and fine cracks, no restoration

Provenance:
Auktionshaus Kendzia, Hamburg 22.5.2022, lot 56 

References:
R. J. Charleston, Bristol & Sweden: Some Delftware Connections, English Ceramic Circle Transactions, 1963, Vol. 5, part 4, p. 222 – 235

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

Price: £6,900