Literary Women Celebrated in $1.3 Million Ceramic Art

In the early 20th century, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, two distinguished artists, created a collection of beautiful, painted Wedgwood plates which are now up for sale at Masterpiece London.

Bell and Grant have been longtime artistic collaborators and The Famous Ladies Dinner Service was their most ambitious and most important commission to date.

The dinner service totals 50 plates and can be seen at Masterpiece London, the international fine and decorative arts fair.

In the 1930s Kenneth Clark, the Ashmolean Museum’s keeper of fine art, requested Grant and Bell to create a 148-piece dinner service for him and his wife at the time- Jane.

Bell’s notebook recorded the full order: “36 large plates, 12 smaller plates, 36 side plates, 12 soup cups & saucers, 1 salad bowl & stand, 2 junket dishes, 6 oval dishes at different sizes, 2 sauce boats & stands, 4 pepper pots, 4 salt pots, 4 mustard pots, 2 sauce tureens & stands & handles, and 3 Liverpool jugs.”

The artists bought plain white plates from Wedgwood and decorated them with heavy patterned borders and portraits of famous and inspirational women.

The plates were used and dined from, despite being art they were also perfectly suited to being used. When Lord Clark died in 1983, the service was split- 50 plates went to his second wife and widow, Nolwen. After her death 6 years later, the plates went to her children by a previous marriage but were later purchased privately. Piano Nobile gained the Famous Ladies most recently and made them famous once again.

Through the 50 plates there are 12 successful actresses, 12 well-known writers, 12 women famous for their beauty, and 12 celebrated queens, plus two plates featuring the artists’ own images (because why not, eh?). The women chosen seemed to be depicted for no reason other than the artists’ own interest.

Beautifully depicted are many well-known faces including Queen Mary, consort of England’s George VI, ballerina Anna Pavlova, ancient Greek poet Sappho, actress Sarah Siddons, and so many more.

The ones we are most interested in are the writers- George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf (one of the artists- Vanessa Bell- is her sister),Charlotte Brontë ,George Sand (the 19th-century French author who disguised herself in men’s clothing), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

For Bell, the service was “an illustration of women in different capacities” and a reflection of ever-evolving sexual politics. Hana Leaper, co-curator of the exhibition, considers The Famous Women Dinner Service a celebration of sorority: “These women might not have known one another and they might not have lived in the same epoch, but there’s an overlapping strength of character.”