Shallow footed dish with English mount

This dish is an example of a Persian ceramic type called Gombroon ware. The port city of Gombroon (modern-day Bandar Abbas) was the site of a Dutch East India company trading station and the shipping point to Europe for great quantities of Persian ceramics including blue-and-white wares and the distinctive white Gombroon wares. Showing an unusually reserved aesthetic for Islamic ceramics, the interior decoration is spare, consisting of small floral and geometric motifs balanced by tiny black dots on the rim.

Patterns of small pierced holes filled with transparent glaze on the walls of the vessel emphasizes a desired quality of translucency. Persian ceramics from the twelfth century make use of this technique in an attempt to capture the translucency of Chinese porcelain. This technique may have inspired Chinese rice-pattern porcelain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, another example of cross-cultural exchange between Persia and China.

This dish was exported to Europe and fitted with an English silver base and handle in 1817. The mounts bear marks including the "King's Head"(George III) as a tax stamp, a lion for the sterling standard and a letter indicating the date.