CIRCA 1600-1650, PROBABLY PARIS OR FONTAINEBLEAU

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford holds three gondola cups, two decorated with an embracing couple and the third with a figure of Flora. They have been in the collection since 1656, making them the earliest known pieces of post-Palissy ceramic still extant.

They came to museum in Oxford from Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), who donated his collection to the museum that bears his name in 1691. Ashmole himself had acquired the collection after the death of John Tradescant, Jr. and his wife. On the latter's death in 1662, the Tradescant collection was displayed in their family home in south London's Lambeth district, bringing together the curiosities collected in the first half of the 17^th century not only by John Tradescant, Jr. (1608-1662), but also by his father of the same name, John Tradescant (circa 1570-1638).

The Ashmolean Museum's handwritten catalogue of 1685 describes four pieces, numbers 584 to 587, under the Latin description, "Disci 4 Chiniti oblongi; in una parte faeminas nudas prostratas habent sua pudenda manibus tegentes", ["that is 4 oblong dishes; some have naked women lying down, covering their private parts with their hands"]. In the Tradescant collection catalogue published in 1656, these French ceramics are described as "Variety of China dishes". They may have been acquired by John Tradescant, Sr. in the early decades of the 17^th century, when he traveled in France for the Earl of Salisbury, and later for the Duke of Buckingham.

A similar gondola cup from the comte Basilewski collection is now in the Hermitage Museum, Saint-Petersburg (see A. Darcel, A. Basilewsky, Collection Basilewsky, catalogue raisonné, Paris 1874, no. 465).

COMPARABLE LITERATURE
Arthur MacGregor, Tradescant's Rarities; Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1683, With a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections, Oxford, 1983, p. 275-276.
Isabelle Perrin, Les techniques céramiques de Bernard Palissy, thèse sous la direction de M. Jean Guillaume, Université Paris IV Sorbonne, Lille, 1998, p. 61.
Jessica Denis-Dupuis, La céramique à Paris après Bernard Palissy (1590-1650): oeuvres, fabricants, collections, thèse, université Paris-Seine-Cergy-Pontoise, 2018, pp. 87-92.