Pottery, earthenware, glazed, Bombay, late C19, inscribed 'Ram Prasad Chau...' [last letters illegible] in Devanagari.

Bulbous body divided into compartments and ornamented with sprigs of flowers in brown on a yellow ground.

Bought for the South Kensington Museum by Caspar Purdon Clarke on a purchasing trip to India, 1881-2

The Bombay School of Art's ceramic productions were traded under the name of Wonderland Art Pottery under the direction of George Wilkins Terry, who had been appointed as its first drawing master in 1857. The pottery flourished from the mid 1870s until about 1890, but limped on after Terry's retirement at that time into the the early years of the 20th century. Early wares were influenced by those manufactured in Sind as Terry set up his workshop with a Sindhi craftsman called Nur Muhammad. Soon, however, much of the decoration came to be influenced by the cave paintings at Ajanta, which had been discovered earlier in the century, and were copied by the Schools students over a period lasting from 1872-1885, elements of which were adapted and used to decorate the ceramics in an attempt to encourage traditions of Indian art rather than European ones. Liberty imported some wares to sell in its Regent Street shop in London See Stronge, Susan,'Wonderland', Ceramics: The International Journal of Ceramics and Glass, London, issue V, August 1987, pp. 48-53.

made at the Bombay School of Art

This vessel was bought for the South Kensington Museum by Caspar Purdon Clarke on a purchasing trip to India, 1881-2. It was made in the ceramic workshops of the Bombay School of Art by Ram Prasad, whose name is on the base.

IS.168-1883