Peacock Dinner Plate, Green

A set of 4 hand-painted dinner plates from Caldas da Rainha — sweeping green fronds fanning from a single cobalt centre, ringed by a border of hand-dotted blue.

This pattern has been turning on Portuguese wheels since the eighteenth century — a motif borrowed from nature and made entirely geometric by the painter's hand. It looks like a fern. It looks like a feather. It looks like neither.
JJ first saw it propped in a Lisbon kitchen and spent some time deciding whether it was very old or very new. That ambiguity, she concluded, was precisely the point.
Place it alone or among the Cordelia plate range. The choice is yours