Armorial Porcelain Plate with the Arms of Okeover Impaling Nichol, Jingdezhen and Canton, China,...

Armorial Porcelain Plate with the Arms of Okeover Impaling Nichol, Jingdezhen and Canton, China, c. 1740-3. The well enamel-painted to depict an elaborately scrolled shield bearing arms of OKEOVER, 'Ermine, on a chief gules three bezants, quartering Byrmingham (probably), Party per pale indented sable and argent; PETTUS [of Blackheath], Gules a fess between three annulets or ... and LEAKE, Argent, on a saltire engrailed sable nine annulets or; impaling NICHOL, Sable three pheons argent,' heavily mantled and surmounted by Okeover crest, On a mound vert an oak tree proper acorns or, supported below by flag-bearing hippocampi emerging from turquoise water, the cavetto and edge lined with red and gold bead-and-reel border, outlining the splayed rim finely decorated in colored enamels with floral sprays alternating with four scrolled cartouches flanked by fish, two inscribed with cypher 'L.M.O.' for Leake Mary Okeover, and two showing Out of a ducal coronet, a demi dragon ermine, another Okeover crest, diam. 9 1/16, ht. 1 1/8 in. Footnotes: Provenance Collection of Khalil Rizk, Sotheby's, New York (25 April 2008), Lot 45. Christie's, London, England (16 November 1981), Lot 195. Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge, London, England. Collection of Col. Sir Ian Walker-Okeover, Bt., D.S.O., Christie's, London, England (3 March 1975), among plates in Lots 177-183. Literature Made for Leake Okeover (1702-65) and his wife Mary Nichol Okeover (1701-64) of Staffordshire, England; see David Sanctuary Howard, Chinese Armorial Porcelain (London: Faber & Faber, 1874), frontispiece, no. O4, p. 398; and The Choice of the Private Trader: Private Market in Chinese Export Porcelain Illustrated from the Hodroff Collection (London: Zwemmer, and Minneapolis: Minneapolis Museum of Art, 1994), no. 63, p. 80. Among the most richly enamel-decorated English market armorial porcelain services ever made, the family preserved two sets of bills for this 154-piece commission, as well as a hand-colored pattern attributed to Arthur Devis, Sr. (1711-87), 'the only complete design for an armorial service to be recorded'; see Clare Le Corbeiller and Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Chinese Export Porcelain (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), fig. 32, p. 32; also see catalogue note for a plate from the Mildred R. and Rafi Y. Mottahedeh Collection, Sotheby's, New York (19 October 2000), Lot 288. Matching Okeover plates are illustrated in Craig Clunas, Chinese Export Art and Design (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1987), no. 43, p. 62; Ronald W. Fuchs, II, and David Sanctuary Howard, Made in China: Export Porcelain from the Leo and Doris Hodroff Collection at Winterthur (Winterthur: Winterthur Museum, 2005), no. 26, p. 64; plate in British Museum collections illustrated in Sir Algernon Tudor-Craig, Armorial Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century (London: Century House, 1925), p. 119-21. Exhibitions Fall Antiques Show, San Francisco, California, 1995. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing