Page 16 - Chinese Export Porcelain MARCHANT GALLERY 2015

8. Famille rose armorial dish, decorated with the arms of Lawson impaling Jessop with the Lawson crest, painted in the
centre with a open winged standing peacock displaying his tail feathers in a ruyi-head-border medallion, encircled by
five reserves, four with birds perched amongst flowering peony and camellia, the fifth with the arms above a flowering
chrysanthemum, all on a gilt diaper-linked ground.
11 ¼ inches, 28.6 cm diameter.
Yongzheng, circa 1730.
• From the collection of Jaques & Galila Hollander, Belgium, inventory no. P. 6. 131.
• An identical dish is illustrated by David S. Howard in Chinese Armorial Porcelain, no. E14, p. 256, where the author
illustrates pieces from two other armorial services with the same design.
• The Lawson family originally came from Scarborough in Yorkshire and is recorded there in the reign of Henry III.
From the same district came Sir John Lawson, who in the seventeenth century, rose from originally being a sailor,
to the rank of Vice Admiral. Richard Lawson, born in 1697, was Mayor of York in 1741 and 1754. He married
Barbara, daughter of the Revd. Thomas Burton of Halifax by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Francis Jessop of Broom
Hall. His son was the Revd. Marmaduke Lawson, a Prebendary of Ripon, born in 1749. The service may have been
delivered by Captain John Lawson of the East Indiaman, Frances, in 1730.
• An identical dish was sold by Sotheby’s London in their auction of Important Chinese Porcelain, Part I, the Property of
the late The Hon. Mrs. Nellie Ionides, Removed from Buxted Park, East Sussex, 2nd July 1963, lot 131.
• An armorial plate of similar pattern, but with the peacock replaced with a peony flower spray and the arms of the
City of Amsterdam, is illustrated by Maria Antónia Pinto de Matos in The RA Collection of Chinese Ceramics, A
Collector’s Vision, Volume Three, no. 546, pp. 536/7.

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