Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), the son of a Glasgow customs officer, was an early graduate of the Government School of Design where he studied between 1847 and 1854. His tutors included the artist Richard Redgrave RA (1804-1888) and the architect and designer, Owen Jones (1809-1874). Both men were to exert a profound influence on Dresser. Redgrave, along with Henry Cole (1808-1882), the first Director of the South Kensington Museum and Director of the Government Schools of Design were leaders in the mid-19th century, Design Reform Movement which sought to systematize and synthesize an approach to correct ornamental design. One of the key elements in this approach was the study of the new scientific discipline of botany. The reasoning behind this was that it was thought that the structure of plants united the ideal with the real by exhibiting the perfect balance of the aesthetic principles of unity and variety and that ornament by relying on this indirect imitation of nature had fundamental principles of its own. It was Redgrave who taught Dresser botanical drawing which Dresser took up with enthusiasm. Dresser’s subsequent papers and books on the subject was to earn him a doctorate from the German University of Jena in 1859.

It was Owen Jones who most fluently articulated that good design could be systematised according to basic principles. Jones published his Grammar of Ornament in 1856 which extolled 37 general principles in the arrangement of form and colour in architecture and the decorative arts. Rather than representing nature in a naturalistic manner in the construction of ornament, Jones stated that “Flowers and other natural objects should not be used as ornaments but conventional representations… (proposition 13) and that “All ornament should be based upon a geometrical abstraction”…(proposition 8) whereby stylizing or abstracting the source ornament through geometric treatment or reasoning removes all preconceived associations from the source and thus creates pure ornament. In other words, it was the structure of nature that was to provide the basis and inspiration for sound ornament, not just the mere imitation of its surface appearance. These principles were developed and extended by Dresser in a series of publications, most notably The Art of Decorative Design (1862), Principles of Decorative Design (1873), Studies in Design (1876) and Modern Ornamentation (1886) where he discussed a range of subjects from colour theory and appropriate ornamentation to interior decoration according to “scientific” principles.

Despite all the efforts of men like Richard Redgrave, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser, the design reform movement of the second half of the 19th century never completely realised its goals. Instead of refining the plethora of styles in current usage into a new defined aesthetic, it encouraged experimentation from a multiplicity of different sources. Owen Jones on a tour through Europe spent six months making a detailed study of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, southern Spain which when published on his return to London became one of the most influential publications on Islamic architecture. Dresser himself as his practice developed took inspiration from a wide variety of western and non-western sources. This included forms adapted from Peruvian, Egyptian, Persian, Mexican, Moroccan and even Fijian objects which he would have seen in the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert) and the Indian Museum. But most emphatically of all, Dresser, like several of his contemporaries including the architect E.W. Godwin (1833-1886) was powerfully influenced by the arts and crafts of Japan, first brought to widespread public attention by the exhibition of the collection gathered by Sir Rutherford Alcock at the London, International Exhibition of 1862. Unlike his contemporaries, Dresser actually visited Japan in 1876/77 and in fact, was the first European designer to do so following the opening of Japan to western trade in 1854. His landmark publication Japan: Its Architecture, Art and Art Manufactures (1882) helped establish and perpetuate the fashion for Japonisme, the influence of Japanese art, fashion and aesthetics on Western culture in the last decades of the 19th century.

Even before his trip to Japan, Dresser, on a visit to the Universal Exhibition held in Vienna in 1873, admired the variety of materials and eccentric shapes used in Japanese metalwork. He was particularly intrigued by the exposure of rivets and joints of various metal belts on Japanese vases; an artistic device incorporated in his own subsequent designs for metalwork as this jardinière demonstrates. Dresser was later to write in his book on Japan, “No people but the Japanese have understood the value of colour in metal compositions.” The body of the jardinière, formed of horizontal riveted bands of different coloured metals, follows this technique faithfully and it is worth comparing it with a Japanese bronze vase in the Asian collections which has a similar body with riveted bands of metal patinated in different colours, (120-1878). It was purchased from Londos & Co. for the South Kensington Museum in 1878. Dresser at the time was a consultant to Londos and very likely to have been the agent through which Londos initially acquired this object.