Basket of Flowers

Carlton Ware's Basket of Flowers pattern and its borders

This is the fifth in a series of nine articles on Carlton Ware's Oriental inspired designs and their associated borders, all introduced by Horace Wain.
This was during his tenure as designer and decorating manager at the Carlton Works in Stoke, roughly 1913-1921. Wain's earliest are based on patterns found on Chinese porcelain from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which around the beginning of the twentieth century had become fashionable again.

Wain had studied Chinese ceramics at Art School so it is no surprise that Chinese patterns influenced his work, especially those from the Kang Hsi period (1662-1722), regarded as the pinnacle of Chinese porcelain production. One such pattern from those times is centred on a basket of flowers, the emblem of Lan Caihe, a Chinese mythical figure and one of the Eight Immortals. The contents of the basket represent riches.

Below, on the left, I show an example of a Chinese export porcelain plate from the Kang Hsi period decorated in such a pattern and from which Wain and many others took inspiration.

To the right of the plate are three examples of Carlton Ware's version necessarily named Basket of Flowers. Wain gives the pattern a completely different look whilst keeping the main elements of the Chinese work but employing different coloured grounds and using rich enamel colours, gold prints and raised enamels. At the time of their introduction, this may have caused shock and horror to the traditionalists!

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A Registered Design

The first pattern number, 2181, indicates that the pattern must have been introduced during the early part of World War One in 1914 or 1915. However, Basket of Flowers was registered as a design in September 1918 and allocated the number 661633. This later date is probably down to the war having curtailed and delayed many Civil Service and Government tasks as so many administrators were called up to fight.

There was a Blushware version, shown on the right, with its typical shaded vellum ground, also suggesting that the pattern was devised during Wain’s earliest years at the Carlton Works since Blushware appears to have been phased out not long after Wain's arrival at the Copeland Street Pottery.

Eight variants of the pattern were listed in Carlton Ware's pattern records excluding the blushware version shown right. To date, all examples found have had the Crown backstamp in various colours, sometimes with the pattern's registered design number, as illustrated below.

Basket of Flowers borders

Barb has identified three different borders that appear to have been used exclusively on Basket of Flowers. Below are her excellent representations.

Border 1

Border 2

Border 3

The next pattern in the sequence of Horace Wain's Chinoiserie patterns with an associated border is COCK & PEONY.

Harvey

V3. Expanded and revised Aug 2024