Vintage Aynsley Dorchester Plate – Cobalt Blue & Gold Stripes, Fleur-de-Lis Border, Hand-Tinted Floral Bouquet, Bone China, England 1960s

An Aynsley bone china plate in the maker's Dorchester pattern — pattern reference 7499 in the workshop's record, made some time in the 1950s through the 70s. Around the rim, a wide band of cobalt blue laid with six fine parallel gold lines, the colour and the stripe taken straight from formal English dinner-service tradition. Inside the cobalt, a narrow gilt band of small repeated fleur-de-lis. At the centre, on the clean white ground, a small hand-tinted bouquet — pink cabbage rose, cornflower blue, violet, red wildflower, green leaves — the kind of central spray Aynsley reserved for its more formal lines.

The mark on the back is the standard green Aynsley crowned-banner: Aynsley / England / Bone China / Dorchester / 7499, with the painter's hand-written workshop number. Aynsley's named patterns — Gaiety, Pembroke, Cottage Garden, Dorchester — are filed under specific four-digit references; collectors who chase pattern names build sets by the workshop number. Dorchester sits in the formal end of the catalogue: not a tea ware floral but a proper dinner-service pattern, the kind that came out at Sunday dinner.

The plate measures roughly 10.5 inches — large enough to read as a display piece on a wall, large enough to set a place. The cobalt blue and gold combination is the colour of British civic and royal china for two hundred years, easy to mount on a gallery wall alongside Wedgwood Jasperware or any Royal-marked commemorative.

A piece for the Aynsley named-pattern collector, for the cobalt-and-gold maximalist, for the formal dining cabinet, or as a centerpiece for a Sunday-dinner-themed table.