Delft – Polychrome Wall Plaque, mid 18th century

A Dutch Delft polychrome wall plaque, dating from the mid-eighteenth century.

The plaque is formed as an elaborate cartouche with an integrally moulded frame and a pierced suspension crest. The border is painted with shells, flowerheads, scrolling foliage and small diaper-pattern panels in blue, green, iron-red and yellow.

The centre is decorated with a symmetrical fantasy ornament inspired by Régence and early Rococo design. An oval cartouche containing a small architectural landscape rises above an elaborate lattice-filled base of scrolls, foliage and stylised flowers. A pair of flower-filled urns flanks the central ornament.

The composition reflects the mid-eighteenth-century Delft taste for combining European ornamental designs with decorative elements derived from Asian porcelain. The elaborate scrollwork, shells, latticework and framed landscape create the effect of a small ceramic painting within its own architectural surround.

Wall plaques of this type were conceived as pictorial decorative objects and intended to be hung prominently in domestic interiors. In contemporary household inventories, Delft plaques are sometimes recorded as porceleine schilderijen, or “porcelain paintings,” reflecting their function as ceramic counterparts to framed paintings and prints.

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The reverse is flat and glazed, with traces of provenance label from a Brussels antiquarian collection.

22.5 x 25 cm