Plate with low foot

Plate, large with a flaring marly; low foot.

Clay: sandy, buff.
Glaze: transparent silicious with tinges of green on the under side; coarsely crackled and pitted. Decoration: painted in pale red, brown green, blue and yellow on a white slip under glaze.

This polychrome-painted plate has a revolving central rosette with stems, blossoms and leaves decorating the surrounding area. The rim shows a loosely drawn floral scroll with identical buds, blossoms and twisting leaves. The exterior is plain.
The underglaze colors are quite subdued and murky, and are applied in a carefree manner often running over the black outlines. The galze has a slight greenish tinge and is crackled and pitted.
This example belongs to a group of polychrome pottery generally attributed to the town of Kubachi situated in northwestern Iran. The designs on this gorup are often outlined in black and painted with dark-blue, dull-green, brownish-red, pale-yellow, purple and turquoise pigments. A majority of the pieces represents male and female figures or animals amidst floral motifs. There also exists a number of tiles executed in the same manner.
The red and yellow pigments in this plate are thickly applied, recalling the red used by Turkish potters. Although there is a remote resemblance to polychrome Iznik wares, both the technique and drawing are inferior to sixteenth-century Ottoman pottery, and reveal a completely different style and aesthetic approach.
Long, black twisting leaves, branches with rounded leaves and five-petaled blossoms seem to be part of the common vocabulary of this type of ware (compare with examples in Pope, Survey, pls. 790-794; Lane, Later Islamic Pottery, pls.54 and 55).