Haviland & Co. Limoges Porcelain Plate, Pink Wild Roses and Green Ferns with Heavy Raised Gilding, Both Factory and Decorating Marks, France, c. 1891–1914

The Piece

A French porcelain plate with a scalloped rim, painted in pink and green and finished with a great deal of gold.

The blank is moulded rather than plain: the edge rises and falls in deep scallops, broken at six points by raised rococo scroll-and-shell ornaments, and each of those raised passages is laid heavily in gold.

The decoration is a spray of wild roses — open five-petal blossoms in soft pink with yellow-green centres, carried on fine stems through a drift of feathery green fern and foliage. The border runs as a continuous garland around the rim, and sprays fall inward across the well with a single small flower set at the centre.

The colours are laid down softly, with the pinks shaded from almost white to deep rose and the greens running from yellow-green to sage, so the whole design reads as watercolour rather than print.

The porcelain is thin, white and translucent, and the plate rings when struck.

Underneath are two marks, in two different colours, and they are the reason this plate is worth more than it looks.

History & Provenance

The green mark and the red mark do different jobs, and a piece carrying both is a different object from a piece carrying one.

Haviland worked in two stages. A green mark was printed under the glaze before the final firing and identifies who made the white porcelain body. A red or puce mark was applied over the glaze after decoration and identifies who decorated it. This plate carries the green underglaze factory mark H & Co, L, FRANCE, and the red overglaze decorating mark Haviland & Co, Limoges.

That matters because of an enormous trade that ran alongside it. Limoges shipped white undecorated blanks to America by the crate, and they were painted by commercial studios and by a whole generation of amateur china painters. A great deal of what is sold as antique Limoges today is a French blank decorated by somebody else entirely. The red overglaze mark is the proof that this one was painted at the Haviland works, and factory decoration is worth substantially more than a decorated blank.

The word FRANCE in the green mark is the date. The McKinley Tariff Act of 1891 required imports into the United States to be marked with their country of origin in English. Before that, Limoges marks carry a factory device or the town name alone; from 1891 the country name appears. A Haviland mark reading H & Co without FRANCE is earlier; this one, with it, belongs to the period from 1891 to roughly the First World War.

The firm itself was an American invention built on French clay. David Haviland kept a china shop in New York, went to France in 1840 looking for a supplier, found that no French factory was making what American households actually wanted, and settled near the kaolin beds at Limoges. In 1853 he established his own works to produce porcelain specifically for the American market — lighter, whiter and in the shapes and sizes American tables used. It worked to an extraordinary degree; Haviland became the most familiar name in fine china in the United States.

The name on this plate is specific. His son Charles Edward Haviland ran the firm as Haviland & Co., while his other son Théodore left in 1893 to found a separate company under his own name. Haviland & Co. continued until 1931. A plate marked Haviland & Co. is Charles's house, not Théodore's.

Haviland patterns are catalogued by collectors under Schleiger numbers, which index the blank shape and the decoration separately. This pattern has not been matched to a Schleiger number here, and the plate is offered on its marks rather than on a pattern attribution.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is what a hundred-and-twenty-year-old plate looks like when it was made properly.

Hold it to a window and the light comes through it. Thin, hard, translucent porcelain is the whole point of Limoges, and it is immediately obvious against anything modern at the same price.

The gold is not a printed line. It sits raised on the moulded scrollwork, catching light at six points around the rim, and it is the reason the plate reads as expensive from across a room.

The palette is unusually easy to live with. Soft rose, sage and yellow-green on white is quieter than most antique florals, and it works on a wall, in a cabinet, under a lamp or on a table without dictating the rest of the room.

One plate is a better buy than a partial set. Hung on a wall, stood on an easel on a shelf or a mantel, or used as the charger under a plain modern plate at a laid table, it does the work of a much larger object.

And the name carries. Haviland is the most recognised name in antique American table china, and this one is marked twice — made and decorated at the works — rather than being a blank somebody painted at home. Anyone who knows the field turns the plate over first, and this one rewards that.

It is a genuine gift for a wedding, an anniversary, or anyone who sets a real table. A single beautiful antique plate is a more considered present than a boxed set of new ones.

A note on care. Hand wash only, in warm water with a soft cloth, and dry at once. Never put it in a dishwasher: detergent strips overglaze gilding, and the gold at the rim is the most valuable thing on the plate.

Never microwave it. Gold is metal, and it will arc and burn.

Do not stack it directly against other plates. Raised gilding wears where porcelain rests on it, which is exactly the wear already showing at the high points. A felt pad or a paper round between plates stops it going further.

For food, use it for dry or cool service rather than as a daily dinner plate. Porcelain of this period predates modern standards for lead and cadmium in decoration and carries no certification to them, so cake, bread, fruit and cheese are sensible and a hot acidic meal is not.

Keep it out of direct sun, and hang it on a padded wire hanger or an easel rather than an unsprung spring hanger, which chips rims.