Dish

Chinese blue and white ceramics were avidly collected at the Ottoman court (1281–1924), where their luminous porcelain surfaces were prized. Turkish potters soon began to produce comparable vessels, and, in the late fifteenth century, Iznik (a city in northwestern Anatolia) emerged as a main center of production. Iznik potters ultimately developed a distinct ceramic tradition known as Iznikware, in which a stonepaste vessel was coated in a slip (thinned siliceous clay), painted in polychromatic glazes and additional slips, and covered with a transparent glaze. Like many sixteenth-century Iznik dishes, this one is characterized by the naturalistic depiction of flowers (carnations, tulips), and a palette of green, blue, and red. The latter color is an iron-rich slip created from Armenian red bole and is thickly applied. The rim of the plate features a wave and rock pattern that demonstrates the influence of Chinese art (especially of earlier and contemporary Ming porcelains) on Iznik production. Doris Duke (1912–93) first acquired Ottoman Iznik ceramics in 1937, when she bought over 1,000 tiles from a dealer in Venice, Italy. In the 1950s and 1960s, she purchased a number of Iznik dishes at auction in New York. Many of them, including this one, were subsequently displayed in wall vitrines in Shangri La’s Damascus Room, a custom-made Syrian interior that Duke ordered in 1953. Three decades later, the collector also chose to display her Iznik ceramics in vitrines located in Shangri La’s Syrian Room, a second late-Ottoman Syrian interior that she acquired and installed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.