Polychrome Floral Dish
Date18th - 19th century
PeriodQajar
MediumCeramic/Glazed stonepaste, underglaze painted
DimensionsOverall: 2 9/16 x 13 7/8 in. (6.5 x 35.3cm)
ClassificationsCeramics
Object number48.61
DescriptionDuring the long nineteenth century, new techniques and visual media were increasingly circulated and incorporated into older ceramic making traditions around the world. Yet such modernizing movements were also a continuation of past cross-cultural circulations and citations that had been practiced for over a millenia in Islamic lands. For example, this large ceramic dish produced sometime in late eighteenth to nineteenth-century Qajar Iran demonstrates how potters were still looking to older Safavid-era works in the blue and white painted style of premodern Chinese porcelains.Created with underglaze painting on stonepaste, the maker of this polychrome floral dish used turquoise blue pigments to replicate floral motifs often found in both historic Persian and Chinese ceramics. The richly hued lotus flower design and floating tendrils form the central round composition, while the wide outer band alternates two additional floral designs in the same light turquoise and dark purplish-red glazed paints. Faint cracks interlace across the glazed ceramic surface today, which is a trait typical of nineteenth-century Iranian ceramics that they tend to develop over time—perhaps due to experiments with revived techniques.
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18th - 19th century
19th century
16th - 17th century
17th century
17th century
16th century
