Serving dish

Object Type
Graduated sets of rectangular dishes had been an essential part of dinner-services since the 18th century, when Chinese porcelain was the only material tough enough to stand the heat and the weight of mountains of food.

Design & Designing
Loosely copied from 18th-century Sèvres porcelain, Staffordshire porcelain patterns with ground colours and shaped panels in reserve became highly popular in the 1830s. This basic pattern (no. 5061) was also made in claret red, apricot, lime green and three shades of blue.

Collectors & Owners
This serving dish is part of a service that was acquired by the V&A from Miss H. M. Gulson, who had inherited it from her uncle, Josiah Spode IV (1823-1893). Although the V&A wished to accept only a token number of pieces because of the impossibility of displaying the service in its entirety, eventually it agreed to take all rather than destroy the integrity of a documentary service. Since 1902 the service has largely remained in store. The British Galleries now provide a fitting permanent display of the many different shapes used in the service.

The Spode family provenance suggests that the service should represent the grandest and most opulent porcelain made at the factory at Stoke-on-Trent in the last years of Spode ownership. The factory archives, now available to collectors, show that the moulded shape is 'Amherst' (named after Lord Amherst, a popular Viceroy of India who retired in 1828) while the pattern 5061 was introduced in 1832. It would seem therefore that Josiah Spode IV, only nine years old in 1832, may have inherited it later from his own father, Josiah Spode III.