Royal Winton Grimwades “Rosebud” Open Sugar Bowl and Footed Bowl, Airbrushed Yellow-to-Green Ombré with Gilt Rims, Stoke-on-Trent, After 1929

The Piece

Two pieces of English earthenware in a graded wash of colour, with the maker's name printed in green under each foot.

The first is an open sugar bowl: a footed ovoid with a slightly drawn-in mouth, standing on a low turned foot ring.

The second is a shallow footed bowl, wider and lower, of the kind that sits on a tea tray to take the slops or the second sugar.

Both carry the same decoration and it is the reason to want them. The colour is sprayed rather than painted — a soft primrose yellow at the top graduating down through to a cool eau-de-nil green at the foot, with no line where one ends and the other begins. The interiors are left plain cream.

A fine gilt line runs around each rim, and a second band of gilt is laid around the foot of the sugar bowl.

Underneath, both are printed in green: ROYAL WINTON, GRIMWADES, MADE IN ENGLAND, around the firm's looped monogram. The sugar bowl carries something more — the shape name ROSEBUD, impressed into the clay itself and arcing around the foot ring above the printed mark.

History & Provenance

Two marks, two different kinds of evidence, and the impressed one is the better of the two.

A printed backstamp is applied to the surface at decoration. An impressed name is pressed into wet clay at the moulding stage, before the piece is ever fired, and it names the shape rather than the pattern. ROSEBUD is the model, and Grimwades used it across more than one decoration — the name is documented on Royal Winton pieces in this same graded green colourway, carried alongside a factory pattern number.

The firm behind it is one of the substantial names of the Potteries. Grimwades Ltd was founded at Stoke-on-Trent in 1885 by Leonard Lumsden Grimwade and his brother Sidney. By 1906 it was running four factories, and in 1913 the works received a royal visit from King George V and Queen Mary. Leonard Grimwade died in 1931 and James Plant took the firm on.

The name printed on these two bases dates them. Grimwades adopted the Royal Winton trade name at the end of the 1920s, following its move into chintzware in 1928, and a piece marked Royal Winton therefore cannot have been made before then. The firm continued producing this class of domestic ware through the middle of the century; chintz production finally stopped in the early 1960s on cost.

Royal Winton is collected almost entirely for that chintz — dense all-over floral patterns printed from lithographic sheets. This is the quiet other half of what the factory made, and to a certain eye it is the better half: no pattern at all, just two colours sprayed into one another and a line of gold. It is a harder thing to bring off than a printed flower, because there is nothing to hide behind.

Dated on the mark: after 1929.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Colour that moves is the rarest thing in old china, and this is a whole surface of it.

Almost everything on a shelf of English pottery is either one flat colour or a printed pattern. These two are neither. The yellow runs into the green with no edge anywhere, which means the pieces change as the light moves across the room — morning light makes them yellow, evening light makes them green.

They are also, usefully, quiet. Primrose and eau-de-nil are soft, dusty and slightly chalky, and they sit against plain white china, unpainted wood, brass and linen without asking for anything. A cabinet of blue-and-white is lifted by one pale yellow object and ruined by a loud one.

The gold line is doing real work. A single fine gilt rim is what separates a decorative pot from a piece of factory ware, and on a graded ground it draws the eye along the edge and makes the shape read.

They are better together than apart. A tall one and a low one in matching colour is a small composition rather than two objects, and the pair sits well on a windowsill, a dresser shelf, a bathroom counter or the corner of a desk.

And they hold things. The sugar bowl takes paperclips, rings, matches, stamps or a small handful of cut flower heads; the shallow bowl takes keys, coins or a wound-up pair of reading glasses. That is what a good small pot does once it stops being tableware.

A note on use, and it is the important one. Sold as decorative pieces, not as tableware. The footed bowl has a chipped rim and should not be eaten or drunk from, and the sugar bowl's crazed glaze is a network of open lines in the surface that will absorb anything wet.

Never put either in a dishwasher or a microwave. Detergent and heat drive water into crazing and stain it permanently from underneath, and the gilt rims will burn in a microwave and strip in a dishwasher.

Do not soak them. Wipe with a barely damp cloth and dry at once. Crazed earthenware draws water in through the glaze and takes days to give it back.

Use a glass liner or a jar if you want flowers in the sugar bowl, and keep both out of direct sun, which pales sprayed colour faster than fired-in pattern.