Lenox Canterbury Collection Ivory Porcelain Footed Bowl, Scroll and Trellis, c. 1953–1988

The Piece

A Lenox ivory porcelain footed bowl from the Canterbury Collection, a small square vessel with softened corners and flaring sides, raised on a short round foot, its four faces modeled in low relief with rococo scroll cartouches filled with a fine trellis. The form is a quiet piece of geometry: square at the rim, round at the foot, the sides swelling outward between, so that the bowl reads as a cushion from across the room and as a cup in the hand. On each face a shield-shaped reserve is bordered by C-scrolls that curl at the top into a cresting and trail down the sides in tiny beads and droplets, and the field inside the border is a diaper lattice, pricked out in relief like the cane of a Louis XV chair. The corners between the cartouches are left plain, the ivory glaze pooling faintly in the hollows of the relief and thinning to a soft sheen on the ridges. There is no gilding; the piece relies entirely on the warm ivory body and the play of light over the molding.

The bowl is in excellent condition: no chips, cracks, crazing or repairs, the relief crisp, the glaze bright, the foot ring clean. The base carries the Lenox wreath mark in gold with the words Made in U.S.A. and, beneath them, Special. It holds water, and it will take a posy, a few sugar cubes, a handful of rings or nothing at all.

History & Provenance

Lenox was founded at Trenton, New Jersey, in 1889 by Walter Scott Lenox, who set out to prove that an American pottery could make porcelain as fine as the European factories and did it so convincingly that Woodrow Wilson chose Lenox for the White House in 1918, the first American china to be used there. The warm ivory body, a refinement of the Irish Belleek formula that Lenox's early potters brought with them, became the signature of the firm and the ground for everything it made, from state dinner services to the giftware line it carried from the 1920s onward: vases, bowls, dishes and figures in the same ivory, sometimes banded in 24 karat gold and often left plain so that the relief molding could speak for itself. The Canterbury Collection was one of those giftware families, a group of small bowls and dishes modeled with scroll and trellis ornament drawn from the rococo porcelain of the eighteenth century and sold through the jewelers and department stores that were the Lenox bridal registry's home ground.

The word Special beneath the mark is Lenox's own designation, found on giftware shapes made outside the named dinnerware patterns, and it tells the collector that the bowl was never part of a table service but was designed and sold as a decorative object in its own right. The dating rests on the mark rather than style alone: the Lenox wreath printed in gold with the words Made in U.S.A. is the backstamp the company used from 1953 until it adopted its current mark in 1989, and the piece is dated c. 1953–1988, with the Canterbury giftware line belonging to the later decades of that span. The bowl is marked and attributed on the mark.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is the small bowl that finishes a surface. On a nightstand it holds a watch and a ring; on a desk, paper clips and a wax seal; on a bathroom counter, cotton rounds or a bar of soap; on a dining table, salt or sugar or a single camellia floating in an inch of water. The ivory and the relief sit with white linen and marble, with blue and white, with silver and with the dark wood of a traditional room, and the lattice gives it a texture a plain white bowl lacks without adding a color to manage. It makes a natural gift for a Lenox collector or a bride. For a shop or designer client it is the marked, excellent, American porcelain accent that styles a tablescape or a tray and sells on the name.