Page 52 - Reginald and Lena Palmer Collection EXHIBITION, Bonhams London Oct 25 to November 2 2021

Detail of armorial on the Palmer dish

This splendid and apparently unique dish is one of a very rare type of designs such as armorial bookplates. Designs and shapes slowly began
famille verte porcelain, made for the Western market towards the end to appear made in Chinese porcelain which had no precedent among
of the Kangxi reign, circa 1700. Large quantities of such richly- traditional Chinese wares made for the domestic market.
enamelled porcelain dominated the export market from China to
Europe from about 1680, as the kilns in China recovered from Nothing however, was as demonstrably of ‘non-Chinese’ inspiration as
rebellions and then the Manchu invasion in the middle decades of the a piece of porcelain painted with a Western family coat-of-arms. This
17th century. Potters were able for the first time to meet both the particular way of decorating and commissioning Chinese porcelain was
demands from the domestic Chinese market (including Imperial very much a novelty in the later 1690s, and armorial famille verte
commissions), and an increasing demand from Western traders pieces only became slightly more familiar by about 1715. In the case of
looking for display and decorative porcelain which had no parallel commissions made for the English market, the coats-of-arms found on
available in Europe at the time (apart from contemporaneous Japanese these early enamelled wares (very few are purely blue and white) turn
coloured porcelain shipped from the Arita kilns). out to have often been made either for successful businessmen in the
City of London, or for individuals actually involved in the China trade as
The amount of famille verte which survives even today in old European directors or employees of the English East India Company itself.
collections suggests that it could be bought in relatively large Fascinating research compiled over many years by David and Angela
quantities, even if it was almost certainly much more expensive than Howard, contained in their two massive volumes entitled Chinese
the commercial blue and white export wares, shipped in very Armorial Porcelain, clearly identifies the way in which this very
substantial quantities. metropolitan London demand for porcelain with a family’s own coat
became much more widespread throughout the United Kingdom
The rarity of this dish, however, lies not in the design, though it is during the second and third quarters of the 18th century, generating a
relatively rare and always very popular in the West. Large ladies wearing remarkable number of dinner services, tea and coffee services and
elaborate Chinese robes and often with striking black-enamel hair one-off commissions like garnitures of vases. The Howards calculate
pieces, were identified by Dutch buyers as a quite specific category; that possibly as many as 10,000 such specially-commissioned
‘lange liezen’ (‘long Elizas’, as British buyers styled them). More individual family orders were placed during the 18th and early 19th
importantly, it is the English coat-of-arms in the top border which makes century, before huge developments in Western ceramic manufacturing
this an outstanding rarity. There is very little (surviving) famille verte and technology made it no longer economical to commission individual
porcelain made for the West which carries an individual coat-of-arms of pieces from potters on the other side of the world.
the Western family which commissioned it to be made in China and
shipped back to the family home. It was, however, a moment of The arms on this large dish have been identified by Angela and David
transition. By the late 1680s and 1690s, the subject matter and indeed Howard as those of the English family Fisher. The arms are relatively
some shapes of Chinese export pieces were beginning to be marginally safe to identify, even though painted in reverse and with little
affected by specific Western demand and taste, sent out to China either understanding of the subtle distinctions that lay behind the structure of
as physical models (long-stemmed wine glasses, metal candlesticks, most coats-of-arms. In this case the key components of the arms are
silver monteith bowls for chilling wine glasses in ice), or as printed identified as: argent, a chevron sable (possibly vair) between three

50 | BONHAMS