Vintage Royal Cauldon Baltimore Oriole Plate – Henry A. Pausch Design, Magnolia Branch, Embossed Border, Bristol Ironstone, England

A decorative plate with a Baltimore oriole at its centre, perched on a flowering magnolia branch. The bird is drawn from life — black head, deep orange breast, the barred wing of an adult male. Around it runs a wide border moulded into the body itself: vines, lattice, ribbons and rosettes in white relief, with a scalloped edge. The designer signed the painting at lower right.

Two quite different techniques meet on one plate. The border is embossed — pressed into the clay before firing, so the whole pattern rises and falls under a fingertip and stays entirely white, with no colour on it at all. The centre is a printed and enamelled painting, and the registration is tight: the wing bars sit exactly where they should, and the magnolia keeps its two-tone petals, purple-red outside and white within. The body underneath is Bristol Ironstone rather than bone china — heavier, opaque, and considerably harder, which is why the relief holds its edges so crisply. Royal Cauldon used this pairing of white relief and painted centre right across the series.

Circa 1950s to 1970s. The base gives almost everything: Royal Cauldon, Bristol Ironstone, Made in England, the subject named as Baltimore Oriole, and the designer credited by name as Henry A. Pausch. Bristol Ironstone was a postwar body, and the practice of crediting a designer on the mark belongs to the same decades.

Staffordshire, made for North America. Pausch designed bird subjects for English potteries, and Royal Cauldon issued a run of North American species from his drawings. The Baltimore oriole is the state bird of Maryland and among the most recognisable songbirds of the eastern woods. This is the oriole plate on its own; other species in the series were separate plates.