Dessert plate with apricot-peach

This dessert plate in white porcelain is hand-painted in polychrome with fruit and decorated with a narrow green band between two gilt borders, painted with a foliate meander in gold in a 19^th century style.

The iconographic source for this type of decoration with fruit can be traced back to the botanical drawings in the Traité des Arbres Fruitiers par Duhamel du Monceau made in 1807. This set is in the antique collection of the archives of the Museo Ginori, and was purchased by Marquis Carlo Leopoldo Ginori Lisci during his trip to Paris in 1810 and brought to Doccia to provide the decorators with new images from which to draw inspiration. The plate shown here reproduces on a reduced scale drawing no. 104 from the volume, depicting the apricot-peach, also known as Albicocca di Nancy. 

Between the late second and early third decade of the 19th century, the Manifattura di Doccia produced plates of the same type, involving the documented participation of painters and decorators Giovanni Fanciullacci and David Zoppi. A hand-painted polychrome fruit plate was given along with other samples to the director of the Sèvres factory, Alexandre Brongniart, during his visit to the Ginori factory in August 1820.