Description
Description: Chinese armorial big dish of famille verte type. The peculiarity of this dish lies in the elegance of the decoration, in perfect Chinese style from the early 18th century. If it were not for the presence of the crest, nothing would suggest that it was made to order, as on armorial plates the decoration is usually more complex. Because of the absence of the coat of arms and of the motto, it took some efforts to come up with the name of the orderer. The only starting point was the crest, which appeared highly unusual, almost resembling a man wearing a diving suit (see the detail of the crest in the last picture of the dish). The series of pictures following the detail of the crest are showing how we did find who ordered the dish. The first picture is showing the complete coat of arms of the Godfrey family: three pelicans tearing their chest apart with their beaks for feeding the outspring with the running blood of the wounds. The motto “Corde Fixam” (Fixated on the heart) is one of the mottos of the family. The crest is the same, a figure holding a crosslet fitchee, but the figure is a moor. The picture is naming Peter Godfrey (1665–1724) who was a British merchant and politician, member of the Parliament, descendant from a historic family (see the Notes here below). The pictures that follow are showing Chinese mother of pearl game counters for the same family, and armorial plates bearing the family’s coat of arms, although smaller and a bit later. From all this and other findings, our dish was ordered by Peter Godfrey through his cousin, who had the same name, and who was serving as Commander and Supercargo of the HEIC (Honble East India Company). He became Chief of Council of the HEIC in 1728 (also about him, see the Notes here below). Only after founding all this, we finally found that an identical dish, although smaller, is mentioned in Howard’s “Chinese Armorial Porcelain” Vol 1, with a black and white picture described as “Illustration Phil. Cooke Collection, Crisp sale, 1923” (See the penultimate picture).
A side note about the looking of the crest’s figure: In the pictures of the game counters and of the plates, we see that the figure of the crest is a moor. Then, why the figure of the crest on our dish is looking so different? We believe that it should be because of a misinterpretation of the model given by the commander to the Chinese decorator. Almost surely the model was an engraving like the one seen in the last picture, where the three dimensionality of the subject is obtained by hatching. Being the three dimensionality not used in the Chinese paintings of the time, the decorator understood the hatching as being dark areas, thus letting the face, chest, belly, and arms white.
Dating: Early 18th century, Kangxi period
Size: 39.8 cm diameter
Provenance: Antiquarian market.
References: While there are references related to the crest, the only very reference found is a dish illustrated at page 89 of Howard’s “Chinese Armorial Porcelain” Vol 1, a bit smaller dish sold in 1923 (see the penultimate picture).
Notes: 1) About who ordered the dish, Peter Godfrey, who was member of the Parliament, a page from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Godfrey_(MP)
“Peter Godfrey (1665–1724) was a British merchant and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1715 to 1724. Godfrey was the second son of Michael Godfrey, merchant of London, and his wife Anna Maria Chamberlain, daughter of Sir Thomas Chamberlain of Woodford, Essex. He was the nephew of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the magistrate who was murdered in 1678 after receiving Titus Oates’s depositions concerning the Popish Plot. Peter’s elder brother Michael Godfrey was one of the founders of, and the first Deputy Governor of, the Bank of England. Godfrey married by licence dated 29 October 1692, Catherine Goddard, daughter of Thomas Goddard, merchant, of Nun’s Court, Coleman Street, London. She died in 1706, and he married as his second wife Catherine Pennyman, daughter of Sir Thomas Pennyman, 2nd Baronet, of Ormesby, Yorkshire. Godfrey succeeded his brother Michael in July 1695 when the latter was killed by a stray cannon shot while surveying the scene at the Siege of Namur. He was a Director of the Bank of England from 1695 to 1698, and a Director of the New East India Company from 1698 to 1699. He was a Director of the East India Company from 1710 to 1714 and from 1715 to 1718. At the 1713 general election Godfrey was defeated in the City of London constituency on the platform of an anti-French commercial treaty. He was returned for that constituency at the 1715 general election, and was classed as a Whig in one list of the Parliament and as a Tory in another. He voted against the Government in all recorded divisions. In November 1721, he presented a petition from the owners of redeemable stock asking that the two million pounds owed to the Government by the South Sea Company should be used to compensate them for their losses, but it was unsuccessful. In January 1722, he supported a motion for the repeal of the clauses of the Quarantine Act that gave emergency powers to the Government. He was re-elected for the City of London at the 1722 general election. Godfrey died on 10 November 1724. He had six sons and a daughter by his first wife.
2) About the cousin Peter Godfrey, who was an official at the East Indian Company, an excerpt from “Xiaobing Fan: Interaction, Appropriation, and Adaptation. Transculturality of Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Chinese and European Porcelain. Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Institut für Kunstgeschichte Ostasiens” at the following link:
https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/31294/1/Fan_Xiaobing_Dissertation.pdf
“An elegant soup plate was made for Peter Godfrey, an official of the British East India Company who was chief of a supercargo in Canton in 1728 and Chief of Council in the same year (see David S. Howard, Chinese Armorial Porcelain (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 172). The plate is decorated with blue-and-white floral sprays and latticework on the border. In the center is an exquisite coat of arms in over-glaze enamels and gilt. However, the crest was painted in over-glaze polychrome on the upper border, which is a common design in armorial porcelain.”
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