Set of Twelve Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica Porcelain Soup Plates

18075cc: Set of Twelve Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica Porcelain Soup Plates
By Royal Copenhagen (Danish, founded 1775)
Height: 4.5cm, diameter: 22cm

This set comprises twelve hard-paste porcelain soup plates decorated in the Flora Danica pattern. The well of each plate is hand-painted with a single plant after the Flora Danica atlas. As in the atlas’s engraved plates, each shows the flower together with its foliage and, on several plates, its roots. The specimens include a yellow poppy, a pink-flowered bittercress, a willow branch with catkins and a smooth hawk’s-beard with its taproot, each set against the white ground.
The rim carries the pattern’s characteristic border: a serrated gilded edge above an openwork band, with pink-and-gold panels divided by raised gilded bosses. Small sprays between the panels repeat the plant painted in the well.
The Flora Danica service was begun in 1790 at the Royal Danish Porcelain Manufactory in Copenhagen, traditionally as a gift for Catherine II of Russia. Every piece was painted with a different plant from Flora Danica, the atlas of the Danish flora published in instalments between 1761 and 1883. Catherine died in 1796, before the service was finished, and it remained in Denmark. The pattern was later revived by the factory, which continued to paint each piece by hand and to inscribe the plant’s Latin name on the reverse.
Each plate is marked on the reverse with the green crowned Royal Copenhagen Denmark mark and the three blue wavy lines used by the factory since its foundation in 1775. The reverse also bears the model number 20/3546, the Latin name of the plant and the painter’s marks.
$ 27,000