Hand-Painted Souvenir Plate, Pike's Peak from Ute Pass, Blue Lustre Ground with Gilt Swags, Signed and Dated A. Blickenstaff 1920

The Piece

A cabinet plate on a moulded blank, and the painting in the well is the reason for it.

The scene is titled in the artist's own script along the bottom edge: Pike's Peak from Ute Pass. A single railroad track sweeps in from the foreground and curves away to the right through the pass, the ties drawn one by one and the rails catching light. A telegraph pole stands beside the line with its crossarm and insulators picked out. Dark firs crowd both sides of the cut, a stand of aspen and pine falls away into the middle distance, and beyond it all the range rises in cool blue-grey, the summit ridge lit orange by a sun that has not yet cleared it.

It is painted in soft washes with fine drawn detail over the top — a watercolourist's method, executed in ceramic colour.

The blank it sits on is a good one. The rim is moulded with radiating flutes and shell fans and cut into a scalloped edge, and it carries a graduated blue lustre wash that deepens from near-white at the well to soft sky blue at the scallops, with a pearl sheen that shifts as the plate turns.

Over that run two gilt borders: a chain of linked quatrefoils in a zigzag, and inside it a garland of eight-pointed stars strung on a fine line.

The reverse is plain glazed white and carries, in confident black brush script, A. Blickenstaff and the date 1920.

History & Provenance

Two things are worth knowing here, and the first is the place.

Pike's Peak is the great landmark of the Colorado Front Range, and Ute Pass is the historic corridor that climbs west out of the plains beside it — a route used long before the railroads, then graded for wagons, then followed by track. What the painter chose to show is not the mountain alone but the mountain from the pass, with the rails in the foreground: the view a traveller actually had, from a train window, arriving.

The peak also has a particular hold on the American imagination for a specific reason. It was from its summit in 1893 that Katharine Lee Bates looked out and began the poem that became America the Beautiful — the purple mountain majesties are these.

The second thing is how the plate was made, and it is not what most people assume.

This is china painting: hand decoration in overglaze colour on a commercially manufactured blank, fired again at low temperature to fuse the paint into the glaze. The blank — the moulded rim, the lustre wash, the gilt transfers — came from a factory. The picture did not. Somebody bought that plate white-centred and painted a Colorado scene into the well by hand.

That was one of the largest craft movements America has had, with its own suppliers, kilns, teachers and exhibiting societies, and it produced work from the frankly amateur to the seriously good. This is at the good end. The aerial perspective is handled properly — the range recedes in cool greys while the foreground firs stay warm and dark — the track is drawn in correct perspective through a curve, which is genuinely difficult, and the sunrise on the summit ridge is laid in as a wash rather than outlined.

And it is signed and dated on the back in the painter's own hand: A. Blickenstaff, 1920. That is not an estimate, a style range or a factory date code. It is one person, one plate, one year.

No biography attaches to the name, which is ordinary for china painters however capable they were; almost none of them were listed artists. What the signature delivers is the thing a factory plate can never have — a known hand and an exact year, now more than a century old.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a small painting that happens to be on a plate, and it should be hung or stood like one. On a plate rail, a picture ledge, a bookshelf or a wall group it reads as landscape art — and the pearl-blue lustre rim does something no frame can, catching light and shifting colour as you move past it.

The subject sells itself to a specific person. Anyone from Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs or the Front Range; anyone who has driven Ute Pass or climbed the peak; a railroad collector, for the track and the telegraph line drawn with real attention; or anyone who knows where America the Beautiful was written.

And it carries a date most decorative objects cannot. A signed, dated, hand-painted object from 1920 is a century-old piece of one person's afternoon, and it survived. Objects like this are what separate a curated shelf from a bought one.

A note on care, and the crazing sets the rules. Do not use this plate for food, and never wash it in a dishwasher or soak it. The glaze is crazed through, which means it is an open network into the body; water carries stains straight in, darkens the craze permanently, and no washing brings it back. The decoration is also overglaze, so detergent and dishwasher heat would dull and lift the painting itself.

Dust it dry with a soft cloth or brush. If it needs more, use a barely damp cloth and dry it at once, and use no abrasive pad, cream cleaner or bleach — bleach is sometimes recommended for crazing and it will destroy overglaze paint and gilding.

Keep it out of direct sunlight, which fades overglaze colour, and off a damp wall or a bathroom, where crazing wicks moisture. If you hang it, use a spring-wire plate hanger with padded arms seated on sound rim, or better, a plate stand so nothing bears on the edge — the scalloped rim already has small losses and tension is what turns a nick into a crack.