For consideration, here is a beautifully colored lavender - purple transfer ware platter dating to 1876 during the Aesthetic Movement.  It features a large airy bouquet of Lily’s. 
It is marked on the back as shown with the impressed initials B W & Co which is attributable to the Staffordshire pottery Bates Walker and Company.  B W & Co operated at the Dale works pottery from 1875-1878 when the company was dissolved.  

Measures: 21” 
Condition: No chips or cracks. There are a couple of manufacturing flaws or fire marks, lots of crazing all very normal for pieces this old. 

Beautiful and very hard to find size and color!  

An antique platter can hold far more than food—it can hold history. One lovely example is this 1876 Victorian transferware platter decorated with an airy bouquet of lilies, printed in a soft lavender-purple glaze that perfectly reflects the tastes of the Aesthetic Movement. The design is light and graceful, with blooming lilies spreading across the surface, embodying the Victorian love of nature-inspired decoration and symbolic flowers.

Turn the platter over and you find its story impressed into the clay: the initials B W & Co, the mark of Bates Walker and Company. This Staffordshire pottery firm operated the Dale Works from 1875 until 1878, making pieces like this during a brief but fascinating window in English ceramic history. Because the company existed for only a few years, pieces bearing the B W & Co mark—especially those dated to 1876—offer a rare glimpse into that short-lived partnership.

The lily motif chosen for the platter would have been deeply meaningful to Victorian buyers. For centuries, lilies have symbolized purity, virtue, rebirth, motherhood, and joy. Ancient myths helped establish these associations. In Roman mythology, lilies were said to spring from drops of milk that fell from the goddess Juno while she nursed her son Hercules. This origin story tied the flower to ideas of divine motherhood and innocence.

Christian tradition later embraced the lily as a symbol of resurrection and hope. White lilies are widely used in Easter celebrations, reflecting a belief that lilies grew where drops of sweat fell from Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. By the nineteenth century, when Victorians embraced the “language of flowers,” lilies carried layered meanings of purity, renewal, and spiritual joy—perfect symbolism for springtime tables.

The flower most closely associated with Easter today, Lilium longiflorum, actually originated far from England. Native to the Ryukyu Islands of southern Japan, it was identified in 1777 by the Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg. Bulbs were later sent to England and eventually to Bermuda in the mid-1800s for commercial cultivation, where they bloomed in spring and became known as the “Bermuda lily.”

Its connection to Easter developed in the United States when florists learned to force the bulbs to bloom earlier for the holiday. The plant’s American story took another twist during World War I, when soldier Louis Houghton returned to Oregon with a suitcase of lily bulbs and shared them with local growers. When imports were later disrupted during World War II, these domestic growers supplied bulbs that became so valuable they were nicknamed “white gold.”

Today, nearly all Easter lily bulbs are grown along the California-Oregon border  (see last pic) in a region known as the Easter Lily Capital of the World, where a small group of growers produces the majority of bulbs sent to greenhouses around the world.

Knowing this rich background makes that 1876 lavender transferware platter even more meaningful. Created during the height of Victorian decorative symbolism by the short-lived Staffordshire firm Bates Walker & Company, it captures both the artistic ideals of the Aesthetic Movement and the timeless symbolism of the lily itself. More than a serving piece, it is a small ceramic window into mythology, faith, horticulture, and the decorative arts of the nineteenth century. 🌸