Jamieson's Capistrano Green Drip Glaze Fan Relish Dishes, Set of 4, c. 1950–1965

The Piece

A set of four fan-shaped relish dishes by Jamieson's of Capistrano, California, in the two-tone green drip glaze that the small Southern California potteries made their own in the 1950s. Each dish is a wedge of a circle, the curved outer wall fluted in deep scallops, the straight inner walls plain, the rim flat and squared, so that the four fit together around a center to make the ring of a lazy susan server. The glaze is a bright chartreuse green with a darker olive drip poured over it that runs in waves down the flutes and settles in the hollows, and the rims are frosted with a pale, almost white speckle where the glaze thinned in the kiln. The interiors are glazed the same chartreuse and carry the drip in softer, broader bands. The effect is of four pieces of the same glossy green fruit, and set in a row they make a pattern of their own.

Each dish is marked on the base with the firm's ink stamp, a shield-shaped cartouche in the outline of the state with the name in script above and Jamieson's, Capistrano, Calif. within. The four are a matched set from the same run, the glaze shading from one to the next as it does on all hand-dipped pottery. They are whole, with no chips to the scalloped rims or the corners and no cracks; a close look shows the fine crazing in the glaze that nearly every piece of this pottery has carried for sixty years, and a few small kiln specks as made. The center dish and the wooden turntable that the set was sold with are not present, and the four sections are offered on their own.

History & Provenance

Jamieson's was one of the small potteries of Orange County in the years after the war, working in San Juan Capistrano and selling through the gift shops and the department store housewares floors of Southern California. Like its neighbors at Maurice, Doranne and California Originals, it specialized in the serving pieces of the patio and the cocktail hour: leaf dishes, chip and dip sets, divided trays and the sectioned lazy susan, all glazed in the drip and mottled colors that read as California from across a room. The fan-section relish server was the staple of the type, sold as four or five wedges around a lidded center bowl on a turning wooden base, and the green over chartreuse drip was the firm's best known finish.

The attribution rests on the mark rather than style alone. The Jamieson's Capistrano stamp, the molded fan form, the hand-dipped two-tone drip glaze and the crazing are all consistent with the firm's production between about 1950 and 1965, the years this kind of serving ware was in every California kitchen.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Four fan dishes are more useful apart than they ever were together. They hold olives, nuts, crudités and crackers on a party table, they sit in a row down a sideboard or a bar, they take keys, jewelry and the small change of a hallway, and set around a bowl of fruit on a round table they make a centerpiece. The green drip glaze is the color that mid-century, Palm Springs and California casual interiors are built on, and it sits as well with walnut and rattan as it does with white and brass. For a shop or designer client they are the marked, undamaged California pottery serving pieces that sell in a set and photograph as a group.