Fruit plate treasures

Not long ago I bought this plate. It looks a bit garish here but it's a lovely clear bright lime green. It completed my set - I also have a blue-grey and a pink in the same style.

These are just basic English-made transfers applied to plain plates and surrounded with a band of sprayed-on glaze, but for some weird reason I really like them and have had them on my wall for years. This series is backstamped in gold with italicised Crown Lynn and holes have been made on the back so they can be hung on the wall. I hang them in the spring-loaded hangers though - much safer.

At an educated guess, I would say these plates are 1950s. (Yes they were in the 1960s chapter in my NZ Icon book but I think I was a few years out!) There are also gorgeous 1950s jugs with the same fruit decoration - I see them on TradeMe now and then but so far I haven't managed to grab one.

 

These same transfers also appear on Crown Lynn plates backstamped Covent Garden British. I have this pear plate and another with berries.



This is an extremely cool backstamp - one of the 'British' series when Tom Clark was trying to give the impression that his products were made in England, the traditional home of quality china.

I do wonder who designed these backstamps.  I have come across one record of Tam Mitchell the modeller doing the 'Starline' mark in 1961, and I guess the others were done by him or by other designers. They are real little works of art.

 

Crown Lynn used similar fruit motifs much later, probably in the  late 1970s and early 1980s. This little jam dish (pin dish) is one example; there are others on larger dinner plates in the Apollo shape.

This little dish has a Kelston backstamp.

There is one pitfall with these fruit decorations. The transfers were not exclusive to Crown Lynn and you also see English plates with the same decorations. This one is Old Foley, I have also seen them on Royal Winton and Elijah Cotton (Lord Nelson Ware).  You will see that the pattern on this pink plate is exactly the same as the one on my new lime green Crown Lynn wall plate...

 

 

That's all for now, time to venture out into the garden..

More next week

ValM

The hotel jug.. a total classic

When I was at boarding school in the 1960s, we had Crown Lynn hotel jugs on the tables - the biggest size, a lovely creamy colour and a classic shape. I didn't appreciate them at the time; they were generally full of lumpy custard or icky lukewarm milk, but now I love them.  Crown Lynn hotel ware jugs range from huge - about 30 cm tall - to tiny, only 4.5 cm. 

This would have been used for a single serving of milk at a hotel or restaurant. Interestingly, it is numbered 1621. All the others have the number 715 followed by a dash and a size number, for example the other two in this pic are 715-00 (centre) and 715-01 (the blue jug on the right).

 The jug in the centre was made for the new Intercontinental Hotel in 1968. It is 5.5 cm tall, and the blue one is 7.5 cm. Underneath, the three jugs look like this. You can see the numbers on the larger two:

Crown Lynn made seven different sizes in these jugs, six standard sizes and the tiny one with the number 1621. Here is a pic of a new range of hotel ware in July 1968, from a Crown Lynn newsletter.



Hotel jugs were scarcely new when this new range was released. Here is one decorated in an ivy leaf transfer, almost certainly from the late 1940s or early 1950s. It is trimmed in gold and was obviously meant for household rather than institutional use.

These jugs also turn up with Frank Carpay's hand-painted decorations - now THAT would be a find! This one is much more prosaic - made for the NZ Army, with a special 'NZG' backstamp.

Every decoration on this jug was hand-applied. The green line around the top and the dash of colour on the handle were brushed on; the army monogram was also put on by hand, and the backstamp was literally stamped on using a rubber stamp. 

Here are some of my hotel jugs. The plain one at the back is the largest. The jug with the red lines is an older style hospital jug. This red-lined ware was phased out and replaced by ware with the beige decoration introduced in 1978 - see the jug bottom right.

Well. That's probably more about hotel jugs than anyone really cares about, so I'll go now! More next week.
Take care till then.
ValM

Gorgeous little jugs...

Here is a classic little 1950s Crown Lynn jug.

Beautifully decorated in sprayed-on glaze, with a hand applied gold trim. The only thing is, it doesn't have 'Crown Lynn' on the base... this is its backstamp. (Which incidentally I think is one of the cutest Crown Lynn marks).

These two, in the same shape and size, are marked Crown Lynn.

Both have this backstamp:

- and both are decorated with the classic English-made floral transfers which are so often found on 1950s and 1960s Crown Lynn. A Crown Lynn manager once said to me 'Stick a rose on it and it would sell' and he wasn't wrong. The jug on the right has a crack above the rose - sad. 

These jugs are all the same size and they're all shape number 775 - on this next variation, marked 'Bouquet' the imprinted number can just be seen on the base.

So far as I can ascertain 775 was a 1950s shape, and it appears in probably hundreds of different colours and decorative variations. It was often sold as part of a tea set - with matching cups and saucers and sugar bowl. An ex Crown Lynn staff member told me that it was discontinued by the time he started in the early 1960s.

(When I was doing doing this post I couldn't find a sugar bowl - and of course days later I have dug one out of a box. Here it is, along with its Crown Lynn backstamp.These little bowls are often found matching the wee jugs. This bowl has an older backstamp than the Crown Lynn jugs above.)

This is yet another variation on the jugs, in a lovely soft pale yellow:

It is backstamped 'Symphony British - yet another 1950s Crown Lynn brand'. 

And of course I have this lovely one, part of  a tea set hand-decorated by Doris Bird in the 1950s.

It has a Crown Lyn backstamp - an earlier version than the one that appears on the two floral jugs above.

Last, here is a utilitarian single coloured jug, without a mark on the base. I suspect - but have no way of proving - that it was one of the thousands of warehoused unglazed products that were decorated and sold in the seconds shops in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is quite badly crazed and stained and I should get rid of it but then maybe not.. it looks great lined up with all the others in the same shape.

More next week.
Take care
ValM

Summer treasures...

Apologies for being offline for so long, I have been full-on dealing with my new book, which is almost ready to go to print - exciting!  It's still a while before it's released in NZ, but good things take time...

Anyway, this wee vase is my most exciting find of the summer. It is a tiny 8 cm tall, only about two-thirds the length of a ballpoint pen. And it has a Crown Lynn sticker. It's unmarked on the base, which makes me wonder how many other little vases just like this are lying about unrecognised.They would have come in more than one colour. I believe it is hand potted, probably by Daniel Steenstra. Sir Tom Clark told me that Steenstra was a prolific hand potter who made a lot of little items as well as larger vases.

 This is what the label looks like close-up, and the (unmarked) base.



To my astonishment I only paid $35 for this vase, and from the same shop came another treasure - $5 this time. Yes, it's an early vase with the fractionated numbers on the base. There are still a few people who aren't aware of the significance of those marks!  I love the shape of this vase, simple and clean. Shape number 43, with the tell-tale flaws in the glaze which are so common in early Crown Lynn. It's not worth a fortune, but certainly more than $5.

This is the base with the fractionated marks.

Below is another old vase, bought from a charity shop. It's shape number 63, but this must be an early one because it too has fractionated marks, not the impressed shape numbers that Crown Lynn/Ambrico used later.

 

Another summer find was this porridge bowl, in the 'Paris' dinnerware shape.  This dinnerware was made from the late 1930s until after the 1939-45 war ended. A few are decorated with gold lines and floral lithographs, which places them after 1948; those decorating skills weren't possible at Crown Lynn before then. Anyway. I digress. This is just a plain, nice plate. I have four of these and friends say we should use them as pasta bowls, but they're a bit too precious for that.

This is the old backstamp on the base.

And here's another interesting find. It's a glass mug, not sure of its age, on the base it has 'Agee Pyrex Made in Australia'.  Look at the similarity between its pattern and the Crown Lynn Mogambo mug below it.  Which came first? Crown Lynn wasn't averse to 'borrowing' other company's designs, but in this instance my GUESS is that the Mogambo mug (1963) came first. Let me know if I'm wrong.

(Added later:  I WAS wrong.... reader Tony has pointed out that Pyrex stopped using that brand name in 1963.. see comments below for the Pyrex web address, it's worth a look!)

One last summer find, in this rather random post... the sugar pot and jug are from the Modello Collection which was released in the late 1980s only about a year before Crown Lynn closed. I paid $15 for the jug because I have never seen one that shape before; there are also long and low gravy jugs in black, this must be a milk jug.  And the sugar pot is a lovely greyish blue. Not sure what pattern it would have gone with but I bet someone out there can tell me!

That's all for now. I am going to enjoy the quiet of our front porch now the sun has eased off a bit.

More next week
Take care meanwhile.

My favourite things...

This week I was going to write a carefully thought out and serious pre-Xmas post but instead we went camping with the grandchildren.  Then we went camping without the grandchildren to recover!

So today I did a bit of a wander round our house with the camera and picked out a few of my favourite things.. first up is our new Ming dinner set, a lucky TradeMe buy at $45. Ming was designed in the 1980s by Percy Golding. He is very proud of it and I can understand why. Just look at the detail in this plate. All done in pre-computer days too. 

Ming is from the Contemporary Ceramics range of the early 1980s. And it's still in perfect condition, this range was very well made.

Also in the kitchen are these mugs. They never get used but every day I enjoy looking at them. Note Basil Brush, top centre, a gift from a very generous friend. You don't see him very often!

Speaking of mugs, these cheery little numbers live in on a shelf in the lounge and brighten up our winter days.  The one on the left is probably 1970s, the other is 1980s.

Most of these mugs have Made in New Zealand on the base like this:



This post would not be complete without mentioning my swans. They lived in a box in the shed for years, but then I weakened and liberated them.. and now I quite like having them around. The big one is the less common 'male' shape; the other is the smallest of the 3 sizes made by Crown Lynn.

And now for something completely different, here is a very old shaving mug. I bought it complete with brush, no doubt some poor old granddad's relic. I love the shape of this mug and it's in good condition when you consider it was made in the 1940s or early 1950s. (Later comment: this is almost certainly 1940s, or even late 1930s, rather than 1950s)

The base is unmarked.

If you look closely you can see the crazing that mars many of Crown Lynn's products. After an object has been through the kiln it continues to shrink, very very slightly. If the glaze shrinks a bit faster than the clay body then the glaze cracks, causing crazing.  

And on that merry note I will  leave you. I hope you have a lovely Xmas/New Year break. I will be camping again for the next few weeks so I probably won't be doing another post until mid-January... unless I find something utterly magical in a junk shop that I absolutely have to tell you about!

Take care

ValM