A pair of porcelain plates, painted with overglaze enamels in the famille verte palette. The large circular central panel, within in a double red line, is decorated with brightly coloured flowering boughs of peonies and magnolias growing around rockwork. Overhead are a pair of birds in flight and gold and iron-red insects flutter under half a gold sun. The wide rim has eight lobed cartouches in the reserve, with a yellow and aubergine double border; they contain four varieties of flowers including peony, prunus blossom, aster and lotus. The cartouches stand against alternating turquoise and iron-red liewen diaper ground. The reverse of the rim has three floral sprays, with green leaves and red flowers. The underside is decorated with two concentric circles in underglaze cobalt blue, one with a central artemisia leaf the other with a stylised archaic ding. They are both clearly incised and with the blackened inventory numbers N:49 I, corresponding to the collection inventory of Augustus the Strong, The symbol ‘I’ denotes the category ‘Green Chinese porcelain’.
Latterly these plates were in the collection of Captain Annesley Warre, a keen collector of Chinese ceramics, buying around 300 pieces from Bluett’s in London 1920 -1933. After his death in 1937 the pieces were inherited by his cousin George Warre and his wife, who passed the to their daughter. The collection eventually went on to be gifted to various museums or sold.
The engraved numbers on the porcelain and corresponding entries in the Dresden inventories, make the collection an invaluable research source, as all the pieces in it must date from before the inventory was made. The still substantial extant collection, of around 8000 pieces, has now been fully digitalised and made available online, after a gargantuan project realised by a host of international scholars. Inventory numbers from the collection, have in the past mistakenly been referred to as a “Johanneum marks”- a term referring to the Johanneum Palace in which the collection was briefly displayed.
The Porzelaansammlung Dresden has a pair of very similar plates one inventory number up N:50 I. They have the same boarder decoration, but a central panel with perching birds (PO 3645 & 6703).
