Museum number
2019.231
Object
Plate, Bow Porcelain Factory, soft-paste porcelain, 1749-52
Description
painted in a bright tone of blue with a scroll containing a flowering shrub issuing from pierced rockwork by a fence flanked by Buddhist emblems and trailing flowers above and below, within a diamond-pattern and foliage rim, reserved with four panels of flowerheads, the reverse with three trailing branches, beneath a thick glaze. 8 3/4 in diam.
Materials
soft-paste porcelain
On display?
No

Further description

Simple name
plate
Dimensions
1.7cm (h) x 22.2cm (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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