Vintage Cherie Starr Hand-Painted Porcelain Plates, Set of Three, 1978

The Piece

Three porcelain plates painted by hand in overglaze colour, signed on the face and signed again in full and dated on the reverse: Cherie Starr, ’78.

The blank does half the work. The rim is moulded in a spiral flute that turns the light as it runs around the plate, rising to a softly scalloped edge banded in platinum rather than gold, so each plate reads cool and silvered rather than warm. Inside the flutes the well drops to a plain circle, and that circle is the painter’s field.

The first plate carries poppies on white. Two open blooms in coral and salmon, one full-face with a green button of a seed head at its centre, one in three-quarter view, a bud still closed in its calyx above and grey-green lobed leaves below. The stems are drawn in a fine dark line and bristle with tiny hairs — exactly how a poppy stem looks, and exactly the detail a copyist leaves out.

The second carries apple blossom. Pink five-petalled flowers with yellow stamens run along a branch across the well, and behind them the painter laid a ground of soft blue, yellow-gold and pale green, washed in and wiped back, so the blossom sits in atmosphere instead of on white.

The third is the most ambitious of the three: a full mixed bouquet. Coral poppies at the heart of it, blue cornflowers and daisies, lavender blooms above, yellow at the left, and dark green foliage drawn through the whole arrangement — all of it over the same soft tinted ground. Four colour families held together in one composition is a considerably harder thing than a single flower well painted.

The painting is unmistakably hand-done and not a transfer. Seen close, the colour sits in translucent washes with soft bled edges, pooling darker where the brush outlined a petal and thinning to nothing where it was pulled away. The leaf contours wander the way a drawn line wanders. There is no halftone dot anywhere, no printed edge, and no repeat.

On the face each is signed Cherie in a fine script. On the reverse, in the same green-black enamel, the painter has signed Cherie Starr in full and dated it ’78, with a small device set between the name and the year that does not resolve.

History & Provenance

These belong to a tradition most people have handled without knowing its name: American china painting.

The method is overglaze. The plate arrives from the factory already made, glazed and fired — a blank, sold white and undecorated for exactly this purpose. The painter works on top of that fired glaze in mineral pigments ground into oil, then fires the plate again at a lower temperature so the colour sinks into the glaze surface and becomes permanent. Depth and tinted grounds need several passes with a firing between each one, because the pigments mature at different temperatures and a colour laid over an unfired colour will lift.

That is why the bouquet and the blossom are the accomplished ones. A wiped ground behind a subject means the painter laid a wash across the whole well, lifted the flowers back out of it before it set, and fired that before touching the flowers themselves. The bouquet then required the coral, the blue, the lavender and the yellow to be built up without muddying into each other — more firings again.

China painting reached America through the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 and became one of the very few skilled trades a woman could practise for money in the decades that followed: painting blanks at home, selling through department stores, teaching classes. It carried on as a studio and club discipline right through the twentieth century, with a strong second wave from the 1960s as organised china-painting associations spread teaching, transfer-free technique and juried exhibition across the country.

These three sit squarely in that second wave, and they date themselves. The reverse of each is signed Cherie Starr and dated ’78 in the painter’s own hand, in the same enamel as the painting and fired with it — which is the difference between a date written on an object and a date fired into it. The group is offered as 1978.

No published record has been found for Cherie Starr, and none is claimed. That is the ordinary condition of this tradition rather than a gap: the overwhelming majority of American china painters worked through local studios, guilds and classes, exhibited regionally, signed their work properly, and never entered a national register. What survives of them is the work, signed and dated, which is what is here.

The small device between name and year on the reverse has not been read. If it is a guild or association mark rather than a flourish, it would place her to a particular circle.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Hand-painted china is the cheapest original art there is, and almost nobody treats it that way.

Every one of these is a painting. Somebody drew those poppy stems with the hairs on them, mixed the colour, fired it three or four times, put her name on the front and her full name and the year on the back. A framed watercolour of the same competence costs several times what a plate does, purely because of what it is painted on.

Signed and dated is the rarer half. Most surviving china painting is anonymous — unsigned, or initialled so faintly it may as well be. To have the painter’s full name and the year fired into the reverse of all three is documentation, and documentation is what separates a decorative plate from a work with an author.

So hang them. Three plates in a vertical run up a narrow wall, a tight cluster over a sideboard, or spaced along a picture rail — they do the work of a group of small framed botanicals, and the platinum edge gives each one its own frame already.

The palette is the easy part. Coral, blue, lavender and soft green on white with a silver line sits against limewash, pale plaster, painted panelling or a dark wall equally well, and the platinum keeps it from reading fussy the way a gilt edge would.

Three is also the useful number. Odd groupings hang better than even ones, and three reads as a collection rather than as a leftover.

They are perfectly usable at the table if you would rather — a dessert or salad size — and a plate that was painted by hand under a cake looks considerably better than one that was not.

On care. If you use them, wash by hand in warm water with a mild detergent and dry at once. Never a dishwasher and never a microwave: overglaze colour sits on top of the glaze rather than under it, so harsh detergent dulls it over time, and platinum banding will arc in a microwave. Do not cut on them — a serrated edge will score the painted field.

On hanging, use a coated spring hanger sized to the plate rather than an adhesive disc, and hook it over the foot rim rather than gripping the painted face.