Hand-Painted Kütahya Çini Footed Bowl, Cobalt and Turquoise İznik-Style Tulips, Gediz Çini Mark, c. 1945–1965

The Piece

A small footed bowl with a scalloped, foliate rim, hand-painted underglaze in two blues — a deep cobalt and a softer turquoise — on a warm white ground. The interior is a radial composition: a densely saturated cobalt rosette at the center, alternating tulips and stylized saz leaves fanning outward, and beaded turquoise stems filling the intervals between them. A broad sponged cobalt band follows every lobe of the scallop at the rim.

The exterior is painted as well, so the bowl reads from any angle rather than only from directly above — worth knowing before you decide where to put it. The underside is signed by hand in cobalt.

You can see the brush in it. The sponged border varies in density from lobe to lobe, the rosette shows the loading and drag of the stroke, and no two tulips are drawn identically. Fine crazing runs through the glaze across the entire surface, softened and settled with age — the crackle that comes from a soft glaze over a harder body, and part of what gives the surface its depth.

History & Provenance

Kütahya, in western Anatolia, is one of the longest continuously producing pottery centers in the world. When the imperial İznik workshops declined in the 17th century, Kütahya inherited the painted tradition and has carried it since. Çini is the Turkish term for the ware: a quartz-and-frit body, slipped white, painted in underglaze color, and finished under a clear glossy glaze.

The decorative vocabulary here is the İznik one — the tulips, carnations, and arabesques the 16th-century Ottoman potters perfected under palace patronage — rendered in the two-color cobalt-and-turquoise scheme Kütahya ateliers favor for domestic ware. The tulip is the most common motif in the tradition, read as a symbol of divine beauty.

The underside is inscribed by hand, in the painter's own cobalt: Gediz Çini / Kütahya Türkiye. Gediz is a district of Kütahya province, and the mark identifies a small atelier rather than a factory — consistent with the hand-thrown foot, the greyish body visible at the unglazed footring, the wheel rings left inside it, and the freehand painting throughout. That the mark is in Turkish rather than the English "Made in Turkey" used on export ware points to domestic production. Dating rests on stylistic and technical evidence rather than documentation: the sponged rim band and the settled crazing place it in mid-century workshop output, before the tighter, more uniform brushwork of later export production. The bowl came to The Eclection through Reno-area sourcing; earlier ownership is undocumented.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Blue-and-white is the most portable idiom in decorative arts — it sits as comfortably on a Georgian mantel as on a mid-century credenza — and this one arrives with a lobed silhouette and a genuinely hand-drawn surface rather than a transfer-printed one. Because the exterior is painted too, it earns a spot where you see it from the side: a kitchen island, an open shelf at eye level, a round table you walk around. Set on a low coffee table where you only look down into it, half the painting goes to waste.

Treat it as a dry vessel rather than a serving bowl. Keys by the door, rings and small change on a nightstand, salt or spices at the table, paper clips on a desk — the crazed glaze is porous, and that's the one real constraint on how it can be used. Against a dark wall or a dark shelf back, alone, the scalloped rim does the work of a small sculpture.

Care: hand-wash in warm water with mild soap and dry immediately. The crazed glaze will absorb standing liquid and stain over time, so avoid the dishwasher, skip prolonged soaking, and keep oily foods off it entirely.