Antique Ridgways Bowl – Old Ivory Bedford Ware, Gold Urns & Blue Scrollwork Medallion, Fluted, Hand Painted, Staffordshire England 1920s

A fluted earthenware bowl about nine and a half inches across, decorated to be looked at rather than filled. Four gold urns stand at the compass points of a medallion in the well, linked by curling blue scrolls; the walls rise in tight radial fluting; the rim carries a blue geometric border under a heavy gilt band.

Two hands made this, one after the other. The blue and gold groundwork came first, printed — the urns with their baroque silhouettes and lotus feet, the C-scrolls, the fine gold stipple filling each cartouche, the parallel-line border at the rim. Then a paintress went over it and put in what a transfer could not: the little bouquets between the scrolls and around the border, yellow and pink and blue with green leaves, each one placed by eye rather than repeated. Look along the rim and no two sprays sit quite alike. The fluting is thrown into the body, not applied, so the light changes as the bowl turns, and the gilt band at the edge was laid thick enough to read as metal.

The mark dates it within a decade or so. Under the base, a round stamp reads Ridgways Old Ivory above, Bedford Ware below, with Made in England and the pattern number 61 at the centre. Ridgways in the plural was used from 1879, and Made in England became standard export marking after 1921 — which, with the decoration, places this in the twenties.

Bedford Works was Edward John Ridgway's factory, opened on the Caldon Canal in 1866 with eight bottle ovens; the family had been potting in Staffordshire since 1792, the date the mark still claims. Old Ivory was the warm-glazed prestige line, deliberately not the hard white of modern porcelain. Written by hand beneath the stamp is a name, G. Julien.