Extensive Royal Copenhagen ‘Flora Danica’ Porcelain Dinner Service

18075EE: Extensive Royal Copenhagen ‘Flora Danica’ Porcelain Dinner Service
Danish, 20th Century
Small oval dish: height 4.5cm, width 11cm, depth 9cm
Large tureen: height 30cm, width 40cm, depth 31cm

This comprehensive Royal Copenhagen dinner service is hand-painted with botanical studies after the Flora Danica, the illustrated atlas of the Danish flora. It runs the full range of forms. These include dinner, dessert and side plates and soup plates, a pair of covered tureens with stands, oval serving platters in graduated sizes, and sauce boats with integral stands. There are also lozenge-shaped dishes with angular handles, small covered dishes and salts, two-handled bouillon cups and stands, teacups and saucers, and coffee cups and saucers.
No two pieces carry the same plant. Each is painted with a separate species, worked in naturalistic colour on the white porcelain ground and identified on the reverse in black script with its Latin name.
The plates are finished with a pierced and moulded gilt rim above a band of pink-bordered rectangular panels punctuated with raised gilt dots, with sprigs of foliage between them. The hollow wares carry the same band beneath gilt palmettes. The tureens are modelled with handles in the form of gnarled branches terminating in clusters of applied flowers, and the sauce boats and bouillon cups have loop handles painted as flowering stems.
The pieces are marked on the reverse with the green crowned Royal Copenhagen Denmark mark, the three wavy lines in underglaze blue, the pattern number 20 above a shape number, a painter's monogram and the Latin name of the plant depicted.
The pattern originates in a service commissioned in 1790 by the Danish court, then led by Crown Prince Frederick as regent for Christian VII. It is traditionally held to have been intended as a diplomatic gift for Empress Catherine II of Russia. Its botanical subjects were taken from the plates of the Flora Danica, published in instalments from 1761 with the aim of recording every wild plant of the kingdom. Catherine died in 1796, before the service was completed in 1802, and it remained in the Danish royal collection. The pattern was revived in 1863 for a wedding gift to Princess Alexandra of Denmark on her marriage to the future Edward VII. Royal Copenhagen continues to produce it in limited numbers, with each piece painted by hand.
$675,000