Copeland Spode "Ermine" Plate, Centurion Shape, Blue on Ivory, England, Registered 1932

The Piece

A beautifully restrained English earthenware plate in Spode's ivory body, printed in soft cobalt blue. The design works in three concentric moves: a plain ivory well at the center, then a broad field of tiny radiating motifs arranged in a fine diaper lattice that seems to spin outward from the middle, and finally a border of gothic arcading punctuated by small stylized heraldic devices. The rim itself is moulded in relief with a crisp egg-and-dart band — the signature of Spode's Centurionshape — and left undecorated, so the raised ivory ornament frames the blue printing rather than competing with it.

The reverse carries the blue Copeland Spode England mark, the pattern name SPODE'S ERMINE, and the shape name CENTURION, along with the English registered design number and a United States design patent number.

History & Provenance

Spode is one of the founding names of English ceramics. Josiah Spode perfected underglaze blue transfer printing at Stoke-on-Trent in the 1780s and is credited with establishing the bone china formula that became the English standard. The firm passed to William Copeland and traded as Copeland Spode from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, and the mark on this plate belongs to that era.

The pattern name is the key to reading it. Ermine in heraldry is a fur — white ground scattered with the black tails of the stoat, rendered as small stylized spots — and it is one of the oldest decorative devices in European armory, reserved historically for nobility. Spode's designers took that heraldic vocabulary and worked it into a dense allover ground, then framed it in gothic arcading, producing something that reads as medieval and modern at once. The design was registered in England in 1932 and separately protected by United States design patent, which tells you plainly that it was drawn with the American export market in view — this was a pattern meant for dining rooms in Boston and Chicago as much as in Staffordshire.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Blue and white on an English body is the most durable good taste there is — it has survived three centuries of changing fashion because it works with everything. Use this plate as a salad or dessert course in a mixed setting, where it plays beautifully against plain white ironstone and against other blue-and-white patterns; the collected, slightly mismatched table is far more interesting than a matched service, and a marked Spode is exactly the piece that lifts the whole arrangement.

It also hangs. The moulded ivory rim gives it enough relief to read as an object rather than a dish, and a single plate on a wall plate hanger, or three in a vertical run up a stairwell, makes a real graphic statement for very little money. Set on a small easel on a shelf, it does the same job in miniature.