Every month, a special object from the Aronson Antiquairs’ collection is presented. This month, the focus is on an early blue and white open work bowl, made around 1670.

Early Dutch Delftware bowls are rare, and a bowl with pierced openwork of this early date is even more uncommon. The pierced openwork of the bowl was probably inspired on blue and white transitional Linglong or Guigong porcelain, also called Chinese devil’s work. These Chinese wares were decorated with fine openwork carving. It was generally limited to small objects such as cups, brush pots, bowls and covered jars. Chinese bowls of this type, with sides partly or completely pierced, are mentioned in the VOC records of 1643-1646 as ‘doorluchtige’(translucent) bowls, but were also made before that time in the Wanli period. In contrast to Delftware bowls with pierced openwork, small Chinese bowls are still quite common in collections.

Blue and White Open Work Bowl
Delft, circa 1670
Painted around the exterior with three medallions decorated with different chinoiserie scenes of a man seated in a landscape with shrubbery and rocks, alternated by interstices pierced with a flowerhead in a roundel, the cupped rim with three scale-work panels alternated by fretwork panels, the interior painted in the center with a bird perched on a branch surrounded by three medallions decorated with a flowering plant motif.

Height: 7.5 cm. (3 in.)
Diameter: 15.1 cm. (6.1 in.)

PROVENANCE
German Private Collection, Hessen

LITERATURE
Described and illustrated in Margrit Bauer, Frankfurter Fayencen aus der Zeit des Barock, Frankfurt, 1988, p. 81

EXHIBITIONS
Frankfurter Fayencen aus der Zeit des Barock exhibition at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt from 1988 to 1989, no. 81, at which time it was still attributed to Frankfurt.

SIMILAR EXAMPLES
Pierced open work early Delftware is exceptionally rare. Only a few other objects with openwork roundels are known, such as a jug (Bauer, 1988, p. 80) and a covered basket (Bauer, 1988, p. 68). Two other examples, similar in both size and decoration, are illustrated in Aronson 2019, p. 8, and in Adolf Feulner’s Frankfurter Fayencen (Frankfurt, 1935), p. 77, ill. 238. A smaller bowl decorated with a continuous scene of a man seated in a landscape is in the Kunstmuseum, The Hague (inv. no. OC(D)3-1994) and illustrated in Van Aken- Fehmers 1999, p. 234, no. 79, and another bowl with several chinoiserie scenes in a private collection in The Hague is illustrated on p. 235.

Price: € 6.500 (appr. export US$ 7,000)