Vintage Bombay Company Cobalt Mug Set Of 2 – White Scrolling Arabesque On Blue, Greek Key Band, Gilt Rim, Iznik Style China, Canada 1990s

A matched pair of tall cobalt mugs, the pattern in white against the blue, each a shade over four inches high, with a scrolled blue handle. The decoration runs in three bands: fine vertical stripes above, scrolling arabesque across the middle, a Greek key round the foot. A gold line finishes each rim, the insides plain white. Two proper mugfuls, sound for daily use.

The pattern is a printed decal rather than painted — the scroll lines hold one weight throughout, the repeats fall at identical intervals, and the join where the print meets itself can be found if you turn either mug. The blue is the ground, not the pattern: it was laid down first and the arabesque reserved out of it in white. That is the reverse of the usual arrangement, and it is why these read so much heavier than white china with blue drawn on it.

The motif is not Chinese. Those interlacing scrolls, the split leaves and the banded surface come from Iznik, the Ottoman blue-and-white pottery of sixteenth-century Turkey. The gilt rim went on last, as gilding always does.

Later nineteen-nineties to 2007. The base reads Bombay · Made in China · Fabriqué en Chine in red. The company traded from 1975 until it was wound up in 2007, and the French line places this one in Canada — labelling law here requires both languages, so it was made for the Canadian shops.

Not a pottery — a shop. Bombay was a North American furnishing chain that sold colonial-style goods through the malls of the nineties, putting its own name on wares made to order. So what carries this mug is the design rather than a maker's name: a sixteenth-century Turkish pattern, reversed out of a deep blue ground, on a pair sturdy enough for every morning.