Museum number
2019.186
Object
Blue-scale plate, Bow Porcelain Factory, soft-paste porcelain, c.1770
Description
painted with exotic birds, berried foliage and insects within gilt vase and mirror-shaped cartouches on a blue-scale ground within a shaped gilt line rim, blue square seal mark and anchor and dagger mark in gold. 8 in diam.
Materials
soft-paste porcelain
On display?
No

Further description

Simple name
plate
Dimensions
1.9cm (h) x 21.1cm (w)
Founded in the mid-1740s, the Bow factory, located in Bow, now East London, was the first English manufacturer to make porcelain on a commercial scale. Bow porcelain was largely aimed at the middle-classes. Famous for its imitations of imported Chinese and Japanese porcelain, the factory also produced some of the earliest full-length figures in English porcelain. From the 1760s the quality declined and the factory closed around 1774. The factory’s legacy lives on as its use of bone ash in the manufacture of porcelain evolved into what we know as English bone china.

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