Dish

Chinese blue and white ceramics were avidly collected at the Ottoman court (1281–1924), where their luminous porcelain surfaces were especially 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. The entire surface of this vessel is covered in a fish-scale pattern; the rim features a wave and rock pattern inspired by Chinese models. 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 several 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 late-Ottoman Syrian interior that Duke ordered in Beirut in 1953. Three decades later, Duke also chose to display her Iznik ceramics in vitrines located in Shangri La’s Syrian Room, a second Syrian interior that she acquired and installed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.