Antique Royal Crown Derby Hand Painted Dessert Plate – Apple Green Rococo Border, Gilt Scalloped Rim, Dated Year Cypher, Pattern 5111, 1898

Royal Crown Derby painted the flowers at the centre of this dessert plate by hand in 1898 — a cabbage rose, a yellow primula and a scatter of blue forget-me-nots, set inside an apple-green border of rococo scrollwork beneath a gilded scalloped edge.

Derby was one of a handful of English factories that dated their production year by year. From 1880 the Osmaston Road works added a small cypher beneath the printed mark, changed each year, so a plate leaving the decorating shop carried the date of its making as a matter of routine. The plain lozenge under this one belongs to 1898, and the word England standing vertically beside the mark, rather than Made in England, keeps it within the years 1891 to 1921. The eighteen-nineties were also the factory's great flower-painting decades, with Albert Gregory, Cuthbert Gresley and the Rouse family in the same department. Cabinet pieces went out signed by their painters; dessert services such as this one did not, and the painter appears instead as a small tally in red enamel beside the pattern number.

That number, written by hand in red, is 5111. Derby entered its patterns in numbered books, one number to a service, so this bouquet was repeated across a whole run of dessert plates, comports and stands, and painted freehand each time. The green scrolls of the border are drawn in outline and washed with two strengths of enamel, the fine leaf sprays between them laid in with single strokes, and the roses built from a few loaded touches of the brush. It is the hand of a painter who had made the same bouquet several hundred times.

Victorian dessert services were broken up long ago, and singles like this one circulate on their own. A hundred and twenty-eight years after it left Osmaston Road, the plate still records under its foot exactly which year that was.