An extremely rare and very well painted Bow Botanical Octagonal Deep Dessert Plate, painted with a highly naturalistic puce and yellow flowering Tree Peony, together with scattered insects including two mayfly and a ladybird, with brown line rim.
Mark: painter’s mark of three blue dots
One of the very best painter hands at work on this rare class of botanical enamelling. This style had been made and pioneered at Chelsea during the red anchor period and absolutely contemporary with the manufacture of this plate, clearly the entrepreneurial directors at the Bow manufactory were keen to follow fashion and appeal to the enlightened aristocracy and mercantile classes who were buying similarly decorated porcelain wares from the fashionable manufactory of Chelsea, directed and owned by Nicholas Sprimont. The paste and glaze of Bow porcelain decorated with this type of subject is always of the finest quality and has a much more glassy appearance than that of the more normalised useful ware of the time, thus suggesting a strata of different paste mixes at Bow for different usage and culminating in a finer class of porcelain for special commissions or for the loftier clientele.