23 The sole exception was Otto Walcha, who in 1967 published details of an Blue Onion Pattern plate in underglaze blue from the former collection of Rudolf Just in Prague (fig. 4).4 This plate features the Meissen Blue Onion Pattern with peach, pomegranate and melon on its ledge plus a border band of lotus and other aquatic motifs. Walcha felt that this variant of the Blue Onion Pattern must have originated earlier than in 1730. An archive entry from 1729 appears to corroborate his opinion that, as well as “items of Chinese tableware” from the royal collection, a Chinese Blue Onion Pattern prototype “complete with instructions to imitate it most faithfully” had also been conveyed to Meissen.5 The layout of the fruit on its ledge reveals Walcha’s plate to be an early one-off. The piece can be dated to “pre-September 1739” with reference to the thrower’s cipher impressed into its foot-rim and is likely to have been produced between 1733 –1735. Further Meissen plates with this variant of the pattern that have repeatedly been declared as being prototypes, and are gone into below, have the impressed numbers “14” or “22” as throwers’ ciphers, dating them to around 1740, thus discounting their having played a part in the genesis of the Meissen pattern.6 3 Plate (l.) D. 10.35" (26.3 cm), decorated in underglaze blue, no mark, brown-dressed rim, two stylised branches in underglaze blue on underside of ledge, China 1725–1735, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Porcelain Collection, inv. no. P. O. 7220, purchased 1879. Plate (r.) 10.24" (26 cm), decorated in underglaze blue, crossedswords mark in underglaze blue, blue-painter’s cipher “K”, two stylised branches on underside of ledge, thrower’s/moulder’s cipher “22”, Meissen, c. 1740, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Porcelain Collection, inv. no. P. E. 2270, former Dr Carl Spitzner Collection, purchased 1890.
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