Antique Coalport Lustred Porcelain Plate, 1805-10

Antique Coalport Lustred Porcelain Plate with Neo-Classical Figures

John Rose & Co.

Coalport Factory

The Coalport porcelain plate is decorated with a purple lustre ground with a white resist design of a centaur fighting a Greek soldier holding an ornate shield in the form of a mask and a sword.

The rim is decorated with three grouping of military attributes. The edge of the rim is finished in gold.

Reference: Collecting Lustreware, Geoffrey A. Godden and Michael Gibson, page 47 for a discussion of this group of wares & page 48, plates 21-22 for illustration of pieces with similar decoration. The authors write.. The likelihood is that any Coalport porcelains bearing lustre decoration were produced by John Rose & Co.... The known examples shown in Plates 21-23 seem to predate 1810.

The platinum lustre decoration here attributed to John Rose & Co. of Coalport is of a distinctly leaden hue... It is quite different from the deeper, brighter tone of the Spode steel lustres. This difference could well be occasioned by the much harder Coalport body and glaze (if not by the higher firing temperature required).

Several recipes quoted in Appendix I state that the glaze for the lustres has to be soft. The Coalport and other hybrid hard-paste porcelains were certainly not soft and consequently the platinum lustre is rather prone to rubbing. It also seems that a peach-coloured, iron-based lustre was used at Coalport.

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This object is eligible for a Certificate of BADA Provenance

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