Antique Hand Painted Porcelain Charger Plate 12" – "Reynards Holiday" Fox in Winter Landscape, Signed J. Holloway 1883, Victorian Art

A twelve-inch porcelain charger painted by hand with a winter landscape. A fox trots across a snow-covered lane; cottages stand behind him under snowed roofs, a church spire rises violet in the far distance, bare trees reach overhead and rooks turn in the air. In the foreground a stream runs out through reeds and brambles. Signed and dated at the lower left.

This is painting, not decoration. The sky is a scumbled blue wash, laid thin enough that the porcelain lights it from beneath, and every twig above it is drawn separately with a fine brush, each fork of each branch followed to its end. The buds are short dabs of mauve and grey set against that sky; the two rooks are three strokes apart. In the foreground the pale grasses appear to have been lifted out of the colour while it was still wet rather than painted over the top, so that what shines through them is the porcelain itself. The fox is barely half an inch long and still reads as a fox in motion, low and unhurried, one shadow beneath him.

The painter dated it. Along the lower left, in black, runs J. Holloway and the year 1883, painted into the grass rather than added afterwards. The reverse carries no factory mark of any kind — only the title, Reynards Holiday, written out by hand in sepia script. The date comes from the artist, not from a backstamp.

Reynard is the fox of medieval European fable, the trickster who outwits every larger animal, and the title is a joke at his expense: the village is asleep under snow and the fox is out on his holiday. Blank porcelain of this quality was sold by the factories to independent painters, who signed their own work and titled it themselves.