Vintage Limoges France Hand-Decorated Plate – Powder Blue Border, Embossed Acanthus, Gilt Laurel Wreath, Central Floral Bouquet, c. 1900

A Limoges porcelain plate, made and finished in France in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, painted in the manner of the great French royal manufactory at Sèvres. Around the rim, a band of soft powder blue — the colour Sèvres made its name with — interrupted by an embossed white acanthus relief that runs around the edge in low ridges and scallops. Inside the blue, a heavy laurel-wreath border in 22K gilt: two crossing branches that frame a small central medallion in untouched white. At the centre of that medallion, a hand-painted bouquet — pink cabbage rose, coral poppy, violet, cornflower blue, small wild flowers — the kind of multi-flower composition Limoges decorators were painting by the thousand in the years either side of 1900.

The mark on the back is the generic Limoges / France in green — the export stamp used by multiple Limoges houses (Haviland, T&V, Bawo & Dotter and others) during roughly 1890 to 1930. The plate would have been produced by one of these factories and then decorated either in-house or by an independent painter — a common practice during the period when Limoges porcelain decoration was a major industry employing both factory hands and the "china painter" women of the Edwardian middle class.

A piece for the Limoges collector building a French antique shelf, for the Sèvres-style maximalist interior, for a gallery wall that wants one decorative anchor in the European tradition. Photographs beautifully against linen, dark wood, or alongside other Limoges and Sèvres-style decorative plates.