Shape Number: 1912
Pattern : 04029
Designed by Christopher Dresser
The photo is Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries.
The decoration is inspired by Chinese cloisonné enameled metal vessels of the Ming dynasty, the colors copied more or less accurately, but with gilding taking the place of the gilt-brass of a Chinese vessel. The face, however is taken not from Chinese enamel but from ancient Chinese bronzes with low relief decoration, here transformed into a two-dimensional motif. The immediate source for this was probably Owen Jones’s ‘Examples of Chinese Ornament: Selected from Objects in the South Kensington Museum and Other Collections’, a series of colour lithographs published in 1866.


Dresser’s drawing is from The Minton Archive.