Italian Faience Covered Box, Green Rococo Scrollwork, c. 1950–1975

The Piece

A rectangular covered box in the full rococo manner, modeled with swelling bombé sides and raised on four flaring scrolled feet. The body and the stepped, serpentine lid are press molded with acanthus leaves and rocaille shellwork, and every raised passage is washed in pale apple green laid on with a dry brush so the strokes stay visible in the glaze. Reserved panels on the lid and on all four sides carry small polychrome floral sprays in red, orange, yellow and blue over green foliage, each one painted freehand and no two quite alike. A scrolled knop finial crowns the lid.

The ground is a white tin glaze over a buff earthenware body, the traditional faience recipe rather than porcelain. Seen in raking light the surface is alive with fine crazing, and the glaze pools faintly green where it gathers in the undercuts of the molding. The scale is generous enough to hold a table on its own.

History & Provenance

The model descends from the mid eighteenth century rococo tureen, a form Italian workshops have kept in continuous production since it was new. The particular idiom here, a white tin glaze with green washed relief scrollwork and scattered polychrome sprays, belongs to the Veneto tradition centered on Nove and Bassano del Grappa, where the rococo repertoire established in the seventeen hundreds has been worked by successive generations of decorators and never fell out of the line.

The underside carries three painted elements: a cursive script flourish, the number S184, and the word ITALY in hand lettered capitals, all in dark grey and all sitting beneath the crazing rather than on top of it. The English country wording follows United States customs practice. The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 required imported goods to be marked with their country of origin, and a 1921 amendment pushed importers toward the English form, so a hand painted ITALY places the box after 1891 and marks it as made for the American export trade. The number is a mold or pattern reference from a workshop running serial production. No factory name appears anywhere on the piece, which is the ordinary condition of Italian decorative ware sold through importers rather than under a brand.

Form, body, mark and wear together place it in the Italian export trade of the middle of the twentieth century.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

White glaze and green scrollwork is one of the few decorative schemes that reads equally well against limewashed plaster, a dark painted library and a plain modern kitchen. Set it on a console or an entry table and it does the work of a sculpture while still opening. On a dining table it anchors a centerpiece without competing with flowers. Shelved among plain white ironstone it supplies the one note of modeled relief the group needs.

Pieces like this came into American houses by the crate through the middle of the last century and most were used until they broke. One that survives complete, with its lid, its finial and its decoration intact, is worth keeping where it can be seen.