Bord 1750 - 1780

Curator: Ah, another gem from the 18th century. This earthenware plate, known simply as "Bord," likely dates from 1750 to 1780 and comes to us from the "De Porceleyne Byl" workshop. It features a lively, Delftware-style, blue and white scene. Editor: My first thought is it looks remarkably…domestic! Sort of a bucolic moment captured, though with that very distinctive almost cartoonish rendering. It feels very Dutch. Makes you wonder who was using it at the table? Curator: Precisely! It is a delightful example of Dutch genre painting translated onto a humble ceramic surface. The blue and white palette links it strongly to Delftware traditions, echoing Chinese porcelain aesthetics adapted for European tastes. Note the landscape scene with its agricultural workers; each carries significant symbolic weight, referencing both classical ideals and local narratives. It also seems the month of July is inscribed above the landscape. Editor: The figures really pop. We've got a figure raking and another slugging from a canteen—but are they peasants, gods, what’s the story? I sense some tension between the idyllic background, which seems to beckon a new society being founded, with more classical sensibilities mixing with those of every day people in the foreground going about the season's routines. There are undertones there I can't put my finger on exactly. Curator: Good eye. The scene seems plucked from daily life; images of work and leisure served not only as decoration but as statements on social order, on labor, and virtue. Consider how neatly these domestic narratives align with those neoclassical leanings also subtly apparent here, the virtue in labor made decorative, yet grounded in ordinary life, if made a touch elegant for earthenware! Editor: There's a funny irony about putting such scenes on something so fragile, as dishes are prone to breaking. Like turning the everyday, however hard won, into something easily lost! All those back breaking realities turned into pretty pictures for fancy dinner guests. Curator: I concur entirely. Even its usefulness and aesthetic function blend to embody the multilayered context, no less fragile indeed than the peace the scene alludes to! Editor: Still, there's a certain playful charm, even audacity, to seeing farm workers memorialized like this on an old earthenware plate. A quirky mirror to both present day routine, and older ones made even richer!