Then & Now | How heirloom plates – personalised, hand-painted porcelain – went from having pride of place on walls and tables to second-hand shops

Families once showed their status by commissioning personalised, hand-painted porcelain dinner services and would display plates on walls between meals

Mostly made in Asia, especially Canton and Japan, they fell out of fashion with the rise of mass manufacturing, and later were consigned to second-hand shops

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Hand-painted porcelain plates in Hotel Francés, Santa Rosalía, Baja California Sur, Mexico. At the height of their popularity, heirloom plates were used as decorative household objects on sitting and dining room walls between celebration meals. Photo: Getty Images

Jason Wordie

Published: 9:45am, 23 Aug 2022

Large, hand-painted porcelain plates offer tangible reminders of other times, and the lingering conferred status and sense of heritage and continuity that treasured family heirlooms epitomise.

In maritime Asia, these items were mostly found within long-established mixed-race families, usually of Portuguese, Dutch or Spanish ancestry, who formed part of the ethnic matrix in Goa, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malacca, Macau, the Philippines and elsewhere for more than three centuries.

Their origins varied; some were European, but most were manufactured in Asia – from the 18th century, customised sets were made to order in Canton. In Japan, high-quality Delft-style porcelain – popular among families with Dutch heritage – had been produced since the 17th century. Entire dinner sets typically contained several dozen pieces, with everything from tureens to sauce dishes.

Motifs varied according to taste, and personal history; successful traders or seafarers incorporated paintings of their own ships. Families with an armorial crest invariably incorporated this motif somewhere, usually in a prominent position on the platter’s interior base.

A porcelain platter from Jingdezhen in China, circa 1800. Photo: Getty Images

Others used provincial coats of arms that identified where in Portugal or the Netherlands early family origin was claimed.

As all pieces were hand-painted, minor variations often exist within the same dinner service. Chinese or Japanese artisans responsible for painted porcelain artwork usually only had a few rough sketches and colour samples to work from; uniformity between pieces was almost impossible to achieve.