Antique Smith-Phillips Princess China Floral Oval Platter, Dated 1925

The Piece

A large oval meat platter in American semi vitreous china, about sixteen inches on the long axis, with a wide flat rim and a gently sloping well. The decoration is a printed and enamelled border laid around the rim in the manner the trade called a chintz or brocade band: a ground of pale ivory carrying a repeating architectural scroll in cobalt and ochre, punctuated at intervals by full blown pink cabbage roses with green foliage, small blue tulip forms, and rows of dotted beadwork. A narrow cobalt line finishes the extreme edge, and a fine line of the same runs where the rim meets the well.

The body is the warm ivory that the maker sold under its own trade name rather than the hard blue white of later American hotel china, and the glaze carries an even overall craze, the fine network that semi vitreous bodies of this period almost always develop. Scattered through the well are the small brown specks that collectors call crazing spots, where a century of use has worked into the glaze.

History & Provenance

The backstamp is the whole story here, and it is unusually generous. It reads Smith-Phillips China, Princess, and beneath the mark is a two part date code, the numeral six over the numeral twenty five.

Smith-Phillips China Company was founded in 1900 at East Liverpool, Ohio, by Josiah T. Smith and William R. Phillips, who bought the plant of the French China Company on Michigan Avenue in the East End of the city. East Liverpool was then the centre of American dinnerware manufacture, and Smith-Phillips made semi vitreous dinnerware, toilet ware and hotel ware for the domestic trade. In the spring of 1929 the firm was one of eight potteries folded into the American Chinaware Corporation, a consolidation that filed for bankruptcy in October 1931. The plant was briefly reorganised as Johnson Pottery and then failed in the Depression. By 1937 the buildings had been split between two unrelated specialty firms, and a fire took part of the site in 1939.

Princess is not a pattern name, which is a common misreading. It was the company designation for its ivory bodied line, so the word describes the clay rather than the flowers, and many different border prints were issued on Princess bodies.

The date code is the rare part. Smith-Phillips marked a good deal of its 1920s production with a month and year, and six over twenty five reads as June 1925. Most American dinnerware of the period can only be dated to a spread of years by mark style; this one can be dated to a month. It also places the piece squarely in the firm's last independent decade, four years before the merger that ended it.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A platter this size stops being tableware and becomes a surface. Stand it on a plate rail or lean it at the back of a dresser and the cobalt and ochre border does the work of a small painting. The crazing and the faint foxing in the well are not damage to apologise for; they are the reason the piece looks like a hundred years of Sunday dinners rather than a reproduction, and they are what a decorator is buying when she chooses old ironstone over new. Used as intended it will take a roast, a whole fish or a crowd of biscuits, and it sits comfortably with blue and white, with brown transferware, and with plain modern white.