RARE Light Blue Staffordshire Three Color Transferware Platter Enoch Wood Butterfly Border Abbey Ruins 1830

$289.99

Brand Enoch Wood

Attributed to Enoch Wood (The Father of the Potteries) this platter and pattern is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of transferware, ever!  Unusual and rare, it is done in a three color process, meaning there are three different transfers, one over the other, each requiring its own firing and a very skilled transferrer for placement of the pattern.  The depth and color (brown, green, blue) is magnificent.  The  pattern is known simply as "Butterfly Border" with each piece having a solid color border (red, yellow and brown borders were also produced) while the scenes on each sized piece depicts a range of pastoral landscapes including castles, lakes, cottages, horses and cattle.

 The landscape on this small, oval platter depicts the ruins of an Abbey and a castle in the distance.   The print is composed of three color prints in blue, green and brown, superimposed upon one another to create the complete scene. 

"The earliest ventures into multi-color printing were for the decoration of porcelain at Vauxhall, however, it wasn’t until the 1790s that the first attempts were made to apply two different colored prints to the same piece of pottery in order to achieve a more colorful pattern. It seems this was not a popular technique until the 1830s when bi-color printing began in earnest with standard borders and central patterns being applied in strong contrasting colors.  The application of a single print with areas shaded in blue, green, and black, heralded the transition in the mid-1840s to a process of single engravings of each of three or four colors that, when applied on top of each other, finally created a full multi-color print".  - Printed British Pottery & Porcelain

Dates from 1830-1840

Measures: appx 10” x 8 3/3”

Condition:  Some surface wear as well as some wear around the rim.  tiny fleabites and / or glaze pops.  This is  200 years old and is in great condition considering their history.


I am listing other platters (shown together in 3rd photo) and plates with different scenes in this pattern as well