Two Indo-Portuguese Mother-of-Pearl Dishes, Gujarat, 17th Century

Jaffer, Amin, Luxury Goods from India. The Art of the Indian Cabinetmaker, London 2002

Museu de São Roque, Lisbon, The Heritage of Rauluchantim, exhibtion catalogue, 1996

Seipel, W. (ed.), Exotica. Portugals Entdeckungen im Spiegel fürstlicher Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Renaissance, exhibtion catalogue, Kunsthistorischesmuseum, Vienna 2000

Please also see note to lot 25 in this sale.

A pair of small dishes of comparable size and design to the offered lot are in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, where they form part of an ensemble with a pair of ewers of identical form to lot 114 in this sale (Jaffer 2002, cat. no.11 p.38-39). When this set was acquired by the Museum in 1857, it was described as Italian, reflecting the current scholarship that viewed the Western shapes of Gujarat mother-of-pearl items as evidence of European origin, a situation further complicated by numerous copies of Gujarat work by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Continental goldsmiths.

Gujarat wares are generally thought to have been first introduced to Europe by Portuguese traders in the 16th century, and contemporary royal inventories both on the Continent and in England attest to the presence of mother of pearl items with silver and silver gilt mounts in princely collections, although it is not always clear if such pieces were of Indian manufacture, nor how the works arrived. It is possible some were also sold through intermediaries in various European centres such as Paris, where the Scottish merchant John Clerk of Penicuik was recorded buying mother-of-pearl dishes and plates in the 1640s.