Antique 1899 Limoges Hand-Painted Poppy Plate – Dated "Christmas 1899", White & Red Poppies, Beaded Rim, Elite L France

A French Limoges porcelain plate from the very last days of the nineteenth century — hand-painted, signed, and dated, in red script on the reverse, Xmas. 1899. The painter has filled the lower half of the plate with poppies: a single white opium poppy with crepe-paper petals, a fully open red corn poppy beside it, three round green seed pods on tall stems, soft green leaves washing into the cream-pink ground above. Around the rim, an embossed band of small beaded "pearls", gilded around the wavy scalloped edge in 22K.

Turn it over. The mark is Elite / L / France in green — the Bawo & Dotter stamp for blanks produced at their "Elite Works" Limoges factory between roughly 1875 and 1914, the period when this New York–based porcelain importer was supplying undecorated Limoges china to Europe and North America. Beside it, hand-painted in red, Xmas. 1899 — the date the (probably amateur) painter finished the plate. Late-Victorian and Edwardian middle-class women in Britain, France and North America took up china painting as a serious decorative art; tens of thousands of plates like this were made between 1880 and 1914, often as gifts for Christmas, weddings, and birthdays. Far fewer have survived.

This plate is now genuinely antique — 126 years old — and as personal a piece of decorative china as Edwardian hand work gets. No factory pattern, no transfer print, no edition number: a single painter, a single December, a single plate.

A piece for the Limoges antiques collector hunting the Bawo & Dotter / Elite L marks, for the china-painting historian, for the antique-Christmas collector, or for the gallery wall that wants one truly dated antique anchor amongst the rest of the vintage.