Lowestoft porcelain bowl

The bowl is painted with the Battle of Camperdown which took place on 11th October 1797. It represented a famous victory over the Dutch navy by Admiral Duncan who had been appointed commander of the North Sea Fleet two years earlier. In this capacity he would have frequently passed through the Norfolk ports of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn and indeed the Camperdown Bowl shows the cutter 'Active' bringing news of the Dutch fleet being at sea to Duncan where he was revictualling the fleet in Yarmouth Roads. As a result of his victory over the Dutch, Duncan was raised to the peerage as Viscount Duncan of Camperdown.

The early provenance of the bowl in unknown but it may have been decorated to commemorate the battle for Admiral Duncan himself or one of the other naval commanders involved in the engagement. This possibility represents an important area of future research. The detailed representation of the Battle of Camperdown on the Lowestoft porcelain bowl, showing both English and Dutch ships with cannons firing, is certainly based on a contemporary engraving and may have been copied from an engraving either by T. Hellyer after a painting by T. Whicombe published by J. Brydon or by E. Duncan after W.J.Huggins. If an illustrative source is definitively proved this will enable a more precise production date to be established between the date of the battle in 1797 and the closure of the Lowestoft factory in 1801. This production date places the bowl amongst one of the last significant pieces of documentary porcelain to have been produced by the factory (the last piece of inscribed and dated ware is a birth tablet in the collection at Norwich bearing the date 1799).