Footnotes

Provenance
Boynton Collection
Hailstone Collection
Sotheby's, 11 February 1931, lot 82
Christie's, 13 December 1938, lot 199
Ridout Collection
Sotheby's, 5 June 1990, lot 324
Graham Slater Collection

Literature
Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition 1914, catalogue p.67, case D31
Listed in Lipski and Archer, Dated English Delftware, p.44, no.118
English Ceramic Circle Transactions, vol.17, pt.1 1999, col.pl.VI

When Graham Slater acquired this remarkable dish in 1990, he embarked on a journey of discovery. Many celebrated examples are treasured in museums and in private collections but no detailed research had been published. Graham's paper, presented to the ECC at the end of 1997, was pioneering and comprehensive. He reported on forty-one dishes, while up to four further specimens were omitted or have come to light since his paper was completed.

The model is based on a French prototype made in lead-glazed earthenware, such as the example in the Louvre (inv. no.OA.5014). Formerly attributed to Bernard Palissy, it is more likely that other potters in Fontainebleau were responsible. In 1958 Bernard Rackham discovered a Frenchman named Jean Laureau was in London in 1620 to represent the widow of a Fontainebleau potter Jean Barthelemy. Graham Slater felt it was highly likely that London delftware potters acquired from Barthelemy's estate actual moulds used in France to make these dishes. This would explain why London delftware copies are so exact, and of the same size as the French lead-glazed prototypes.

Graham Slater divided the London dishes into ten distinct groups based partly on date but primarily on different features in the painted decoration. Dates painted on La Fecondité dishes range from 1633 to 1697. Slater placed his dish into Group Six, along with four others. The date appearing on the present lot is, of course, ambiguous as the last two numbers are unreadable. It had been published in the past as dated 1671, but Slater argues conclusively that it has to be earlier. Various decorative details, such as a man holding a stick and a very distinctive style of landscape painted in the distance, place the manufacture of this dish firmly in Southwark in the middle of the seventeenth century. Based on the evidence presented in his paper, Slater shows that this dish must date from circa 1657-59 and not any later.

Three of the dishes in Slater's Group Six are inscribed on the back with the same initials WP. It is likely these initials relate to the maker, and Slater tried to identify a potter working in Southwark whose name was a match. Rhoda Edwards has published a List of London Potters that includes a William Price and a William Pocock, both living in the Parish of St Saviour in Southwark, but to date neither of these WPs can be directly linked to the nearby pottery at Montagu Place or the Pickleherring Pottery. This dish, and a closely related piece in the museum in Auckland, New Zealand, inscribed with the same initials, show that 'WP' was clearly a very accomplished maker of London delftware.

In his ECC paper, Graham Slater attempted to identify the portraits on his dish. Although tempting to regard the two small panels at the bottom as royal portraits, he concluded they were too small and indistinct to recognise. The half-length portrait in the primary panel at the top is far more detailed, however. The bare-headed man dressed in armour wears what is usually described as a 'Puritan Collar'. Given that the dish dates from around the period of the Commonwealth, an obvious attribution of the sitter comes to mind. Searching at the British Museum's Prints and Drawings department, Slater was directed to likenesses of Oliver Cromwell. The man on this dish has more than a passing resemblance to a print that Slater reproduced in his paper as fig.39. The engraved portrait is loosely after Robert Walker. Here Cromwell is shown in similar dress with a big nose and a bulge in his body armour around his right shoulder. The portrait on the present dish could be said to depict similar features. If so, this dish, and another heavily-misfired La Fecondité dish formerly in the Billington Collection, are probably the only pieces of English delftware with a portrait of Britain's Lord Protector.