Reticulated Porcelain Bowl, Ribbon-Pierced Border over Chintz Rose Decoration with Gilt Rim, c. 1940–1970

The Piece

A shallow round bowl in thin white porcelain, and the whole argument for it sits in the border. The rim flares out and is cut clean through in a continuous band of teardrop openings, each one separated from the next by a moulded loop of relief that reads as woven ribbon. Held up to a window the border goes to lace and the light comes through it.

Inside, the well is given over to a dense chintz: cabbage roses in two pinks, blue forget-me-nots, lilac blossom and small yellow buds, all carried on fine trailing green stems that run edge to edge with no ground showing between them. A fine gilt line rings the well where the pattern stops and the pierced border begins.

The scalloped outer edge is gilt, and it has worn. Along long stretches of the rim the gold has rubbed back to a soft brown and in places to bare white porcelain, heaviest where a hand would take hold of it.

The underside is plain white glaze on a low foot ring, with a raised circular pad at the centre carrying a small nub left from the mould.

History & Provenance

This is not a colander, and we would rather say so than let the photographs imply it. Every opening is in the flared rim; the well and the base are solid, unbroken glazed porcelain. It will hold water. Reticulation of this kind is ornament, not drainage, and a bowl pierced only at the border has never at any point in its life been intended to strain anything.

What it is instead is the expensive kind of decoration. Reticulated porcelain is pierced by hand at the leather-hard stage — firm enough to hold its shape, soft enough to cut — with a thin blade, each opening outlined and then cut in clean strokes and pushed out individually. The cut pieces are commonly left sitting in their holes until the whole design is finished, because a wall full of open voids dries unevenly and cracks. Then the piece has to survive two firings with all those fragile bridges of clay still spanning between the openings.

The failure rate is the entire story of the technique, and it is why pierced ware has always cost more than plain. The Chinese name for it is the blunt one: linglong, which the European trade translated as devil's work. At the top of the craft, George Owen at Royal Worcester spent the late nineteenth century cutting honeycomb piercings so fine and so regular that they were assumed to be mechanical, and he worked behind a screen so nobody could see how it was done.

The decoration belongs to a different tradition. Chintz takes its name from the printed Indian cottons that reached Europe in the seventeenth century, and by chintz a ceramics buyer means this: an all-over floral with no plain ground left anywhere, printed rather than painted. On porcelain it is achieved with a multi-colour transfer, and the tell is exactly what you see here — the pattern runs continuously and repeats, and it does not vary the way a brush varies.

Two things stated plainly. There is no maker's mark, backstamp, country stamp or pattern number anywhere on the base, so we are not attributing it; pierced chintz ware of this kind was made in quantity for the American market by both Japanese and Continental factories, and much of it left the works carrying a foil label that came off in the first wash. And the range below rests on the body, the transfer and the gilding rather than on documentation, which is a weaker basis, so it is given as a window rather than a year.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Pierced borders do something no printed pattern can: they change with the light. On a windowsill or under a lamp the openings throw the border into a ring of small bright shapes, and the bowl reads differently at every hour of the day. Flat white porcelain simply does not do that.

It is the right size for the jobs a plate is too big for and a dish too plain — a few wrapped chocolates, nuts, sugared almonds, potpourri, keys by a door, rings and a watch on a dresser. Because the base is solid it will also take a pillar candle or a low arrangement of cut stems without anything running through it.

The rubbed gold is the argument rather than the apology. Gilt that has softened to brown along a rim is what decades of hands look like, and it is the difference between porcelain that has been lived with and porcelain made last year to look old. It also means the piece prices as a decorative object rather than as cabinet china, which is the honest place for it.

A note on care, and the piercings are the reason for it. Hand wash only, in warm water with mild soap, supporting the bowl from underneath rather than gripping the pierced rim — those thin bridges are the weakest part of the object and they will not survive being squeezed. Never put it in a dishwasher: the spray pressure works directly on the openwork and the detergent will strip what is left of the gilding in a single cycle. Never microwave it, since the gold is metal and will arc. Dry it with a soft cloth rather than letting water sit in the openings, and store it where nothing can stack on the rim.