Floral dreams
- willa
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
You know that I love flowers... so to celebrate the spring, this week I have 21 stunning plates made by the Copeland factory (successor of Spode) in 1848. Each plate is decorated with a unique sublimely painted flower arrangement by the artist Greatbatch, who was a very celebrated flower painter.
Potted in very fine white porcelain, the rims of each plate has been meticulously reticulated or pierced in the "Gothic" shape. These plates would have belonged to a sublimely expensive dessert service; reticulation was time consuming and difficult, and just this detail would have made these plates very costly.
The sublime flower arrangements painted in the centre of each plate were painted by Isaac Greatbatch, one of the well-known floral artists working for Copeland. The Greatbatch family was a family of porcelain painters, gilders, makers and engravers. Isaac Greatbatch was born in 1789 and was active as a painter between 1845 and 1860. He worked together with his brother Richard Greatbatch, who was a gilder. The Greatbatch family was blessed with talented ladies who found a career in painting; Isaac and Richard's sisters Mary Barnet and Miranda Prince, as well as Richard's daughter Anne were at it, too.
All plates are stamped with the small blue Copeland mark with interlocking C's, and painted in red with the pattern number 7913, dating it at the year 1848. I have split the plates up in two sets of 8, and 5 individual plates.
Documentation: A plate of this service is shown on page 80 of Steven Smith's "Spode & Copeland: Over Two Hundred Years of Fine China and Porcelain". References to the painter can be found on page 213 and 257 of Vera Wilkinson's "Spode-Copeland-Spode: The Works And Its People 1770-1970".
Where to find things
You can find these plates here, and all my dinner and dessert services are here. You can find all my available stock here. If you always want to see the latest additions, follow me on Instagram... I post pictures and a story several times a week.
Happy weekend everyone, and celebrate the spring with some flowers! 🌸🌹🌼
with thanks to Robert Philip Adams @robert_in_bucks for the valuable information on the Greatbatch family
This week's treasures:
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