Live Auction 10397Centuries of Style: Silver, European Ceramics, Portrait Miniatures and Gold Boxes
AN ENGLISH DELFTWARE SMALL ROYAL PORTRAIT DISH OF JAMES II
Lot 90

AN ENGLISH DELFTWARE SMALL ROYAL PORTRAIT DISH OF JAMES II

CIRCA 1685, BRISLINGTON

Closed3 June 2015

Price Realised

GBP 68,500

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AN ENGLISH DELFTWARE SMALL ROYAL PORTRAIT DISH OF JAMES II
CIRCA 1685, BRISLINGTON
Painted in blue, manganese and yellow with a half-length portrait of James II wearing a blue and ochre crown flanked by J2/R in manganese within an ochre-line rim (very slight flaking and chipping to rims)
7¼ in. (18.5 cm.) diam.

With Stoner and Evans Inc., New York City.
Iron-red inventory number 1951.592.
With Alistair Sampson Antiques, from whom it was acquired on 19 January 1989.
The Hon. Simon Sainsbury; sale, 'Simon Sainsbury: The Creation of an English Arcadia', Christie's, London, 18 June 2008, lot 79.

Specialist note

This dish is decorated with an extremely rare subject and is unusually small in size. A dish decorated with the same subject was in the Lipski Collection and was sold by Sotheby's London on 10 March 1981, lot 47 and is now in the British Museum, see Aileen Dawson, English and Irish Delftware 1570-1840, London, 2010, pp. 52-53, cat. no. 12. Michael Archer discusses six other dishes decorated with the same 'quizzical' portrait of James II, of which four are larger examples and have the more usual foliate border design, see Delftware, the Tin-Glazed Earthenware of the British Isles, a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1997, p. 77, no. A.7.

Another dish, almost certainly by the same hand, painted with a portrait of King William, was sold by Sotheby's London on 22 October 1974, lot 92 and is illustrated by Jonathan Horne, A Collection of English Pottery, Part XX, March 2000, no. 585.