Ice dish with cover; porcelain
Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory, 1803–1804

The David Collection mainly contains dinnerware from the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory among others this round porcelain ice dish, decorated in blue. It has a beautiful accompanying cover with upward-sloping sides, adorned with fourteen alternating flat and openwork borders shaped like acanthus stalks. At the top is a finial in the form of a highly stylised snail shell.

Several scholars point to the ice dish with cover as a particularly Danish phenomenon as the type is not known from any other porcelain factory of the time, neither in Denmark nor abroad.¹ Therefore, today it is considered an invention made by the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory, which during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century produced ice dishes in two different designs featuring different decorations. The present model is believed to have been made in the years 1803–1804, whereas the museum’s other ice dish with cover (KP 54) was created somewhat earlier, around 1782.²

The porcelain painter Lars Hansen painted the ice dish, just as he also painted the museum’s ice pot (KP 175). Sadly, we do not know who painted the cover, as its signature is indistinct. However, it is most likely to have been a painter who, like Lars Hansen, specialised in working with the factory’s blue decorated wares, of which the Blue Fluted pattern is the most famous. Based on designs from Chinese porcelain painting, the pattern found its final form at the Meissen Manufactory in Germany, after which it was copied at the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory from circa the mid-1770s onwards. Here, however, the pattern underwent a number of changes during the factory’s early years, partly due to the porcelain painters’ personal ways of painting. Later, at the end of the nineteenth century, the pattern served as the model for the factory’s popular and highly regarded half- and full-lace Blue Fluted services.³