Punch bowl made for the ship 'Swallow', soft-paste porcelain, painted in enamels, made by Richard Chaffers factory, Liverpool, probably decorated by William Jackson, ca. 1763.

Punch bowl of soft-paste porcelain, painted in enamels inside with a two-masted ship inscribed below 'The Swallow', on a pink scroll; narrow red diaper border. Outside, a crimson peony and other flowers and a fence in Chinese style in colours.

Bequeathed by Mr Wallace Elliot

Provenance: London, Hyam, 1923.

The bowl is considered by Maurice Hillis to have been produced to commemorate the launch of the ship, c.1763, by Richard Chaffers' Shaw's Brow porcelain works. Earlier writers have suggested the bowl dates from c.1770, after Philip Christian took over Shaw's Brow following Chaffers' death.

The artist William Jackson, a painter of ships active in the later decades of the 18th-century, has been proposed as behind the decoration of this piece. A number of pieces of porcelain and tin-glazed earthenware painted with ships have been tentatively attributed to Jackson, or at least in his style, based on the stylistic similarities to Marine paintings signed by him. Bernard Watney has drawn a comparison to a large Liverpool delftware punchbowl in the V&A (3615-1901) that depicts an unnamed frigate and is dated to 1765-70, as well as the similar sized delftware punchbowl inscribed 'Success to the Africa Trade / George Dickinson' and showing a fleet of ships, at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

This bowl was made for the 'Swallow', a Liverpool slave ship launched in 1763.

C.58-1938