Anna Burnside
Head of Sale
Lot 141
An important English slipware Tulip dish, 18th century
11 June 2025, 10:30 BST
London, Knightsbridge£10,000 - £15,000
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Fergus Gambon
Director
An important English slipware Tulip dish, 18th century
Possibly Midlands, of generous shallow circular shape with a notched or piecrust rim, the buff body trailed in two colours of slip with a symmetrical arrangement of tulips alternating with other stylised flowers with trellis and loop-and-dot ornament, interspersed with simple dot clusters, the rim with a simple line border, all on a cream ground, 41.7cm diam
Footnotes
Provenance
A Private Welsh Collection
This dish garnered some excitement when appraised by Hugo Morley-Fletcher on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow in Pembroke in 1993. The shape of the dish and distinctive dot clusters in the design links the present dish to a small group of dated dishes, mostly decorated with birds, with dates ranging from 1769-1806. An example dated 1772 is illustrated by David Barker and Steve Crompton, Slipware in the Collection of the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery (2007), p.145 and another dated 1788 is illustrated by Leslie B Grigsby, The Longridge Collection of English Slipware and Delftware, Vol.1 (2000), pp.87-8, no.S27. See also the example dated 1787 sold by Bonhams on 22 June 2022, lot 192. A related dish decorated with tulips is illustrated by Ronald G Cooper, English Slipware Dishes (1968), no.303 also belongs to this same distinctive group, but no other example with tulip decoration would appear to be recorded.
The design is undoubtedly derived from earlier Staffordshire examples, although Grigsby states that there is no archaeological evidence to support an Staffordshire attribution for this group of dishes. An example dated 1730, attributed to Thomas Simpson and decorated with a related symmetrical arrangement of tulips within a trellis border, is illustrated by Grigsby (2000), p.95, no.S36. Grigsby suggests that tulips depicted in an abstract and segmented way such as this are likely to have ultimately been inspired by 16th and 17th century Northern European slipware.