Frank Tilley used this actual plate ‘as the final link in a chain of evidence’ to argue in 1963 that these rare stoneware plates were decorated at Battersea.[i] He pointed out that certain much more finely engraved prints which were designed to fill the complete cavetto were used on a series of plates and that these prints are not found on tiles or other wares that could be attributed to potteries in Liverpool and Staffordshire. His discovery that Simon François Ravenet, who was long associated with transfer printing on Battersea enamels, was the engraver of this particular design confirmed his conjecture.
Excavations at York House, Battersea, between 1996 and 1998 proved that such iron-red transfer printed decoration was executed at the short-lived enamel decorating enterprise of Stephen Theodore Janssen and John Brooks that operated there between the third quarter of 1753 and no later than the third quarter of 1756.[ii]
Judith Crouch published two tile fragments printed in iron-red after John Daullé’s “La Souffleuse de Savon” after Boucher. This print in a similar iron-red also appears on an octagonal salt-glazed stoneware plate with the same diaper and scroll border design as our plate. A further fragment of Chinese porcelain was found with part of a transfer print after Boucher’s “Le Marchand d’Oiseaux” which can also be found in iron-red on a stoneware plate of identical form to ours.[iii] John Brooks claimed to be able to transfer-print on stoneware and Delft in his patent applications of 1754 and 1755. The York House sale notice of bankrupt stock sold in June 1756 also mentions “some hundred dozens of stone plates and Dutch tiles”.[iv]
Ravenet after Hayman from The History and adventures of the renowned Don Quixote, translated by Tobias Smollet, London 1755
The image is from Simon François Ravenet’s engraving after Francis Hayman (1708-1776), a version of which was published in Tobias’s Smollett’s Don Quixote (1755) Vol I, Book 3, Chapter VII p. 126.[v] It depicts the scene in which Don Quixote chides his faithful squire Sancho Panza for not accepting the dented barber’s bowl as the legendary golden helmet of Mambrino:
“Sancho […] thou hast the most limited understanding that any squire in the world has or ever had. […] What seems to thee a barber’s basin seems to me Mambrino’s helmet, and to another it will seem something else”
Frank Tilley points out that although Smollet’s translation was only published in 1755, the plates would have been produced at least two years earlier, just at the time when Janssen and Brooks’ enamel factory was operating.
Only one other identical plate is recorded: a damaged plate formerly in the Norman Stretton Collection, sold at Phillips, London, February 21, 2001, lot 163.
Condition:
Good, no restoration
Provenance:
Tilley & Co., London
Property from the Estate of Majorie Wiggin Prescott, sold, Christie’s, New York, March 6, 1981, lot 51
The Harriet Carlton Goldweitz Collection, sold, Sotheby’s, New York, 20 January 2006, lot 95
The Stanley F. Goldfein Collection
References:
Crouch 2005
Judith Crouch, ‘York House Battersea; Finds from the excavation of the Enamel Manufactory’, Transactions English Ceramic Circle, Vol. 19, part I, 2005
Smollet 1755
T. Smollett, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, (London, 1755), Vol. 1, Book 3, Chapter VII, p. 126
Literature:
Edwards and Hampson 2005
Diana Edwards and Rodney Hampson, ‘White salt-glazed stoneware of the British Isles’, Antique Collectors Club, 2005, illustrated on page 137
Goldweitz 1984
H. Carlton Goldweitz, ‘An American Collection of English Pottery: A Chronology 1635-1778’, English Ceramic Circle Transactions, Vol. 12, part 1, 1984, pp. 17-18 and pl. 241 and c.
Tilley 1963
F. Tilley, ‘Ravenet an Engraver for Battersea Transfers on Salt-glaze plates: The Final Link in the Chain of Evidence’, The Antique Collector, June 1963, pp. 121-128.
Reserved
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
[i] Tilley 1963.
[ii] Crouch 2005, p. 41 note 3.
[iii] Crouch 2005, fig. 22, 24, 26 & 28.
[iv] Crouch 2005, p. 30 & 38.
[v] Edwards and Hampson 2005, p. 137, fig. 112.