Object Record

Peacock Feather Plate

Ceramist

Auguste Delaherche

Year

c. 1900

Material

Polychrome glazed stoneware with incised peacock-feather decoration

Dimensions

D 29 cm

Animal Classification

Birds → Land & Aerial Birds

Geographic Classification

France → Hauts-de-France → Oise → La Chapelle-aux-Pots

Object Details

Marks & Inscriptions

Impressed circular mark on the underside, reading “AUGUSTE DELAHERCHE” around a double-ring device.

Impressed model number “5773” on the underside.

Provenance

Robert Zehil Gallery, Monaco

Literature

Paul Arthur, French Art Nouveau Ceramics: An Illustrated Dictionary (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2015), p. 133, illustrating a Delaherche vase with peacock-feather decoration exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, documenting the motif within his early production.

Robert Zehil Gallery, Monaco, invoice no. 25620, dated July 25, 2025, describing the work as an Auguste Delaherche polychrome glazed stoneware plate with peacock-feather decoration, signed and numbered “5773.”

Authorship & Production

Auguste Delaherche (ceramist, French, 1857–1940), La Chapelle-aux-Pots, Oise, Hauts-de-France, France.

Commentary

This 29 cm stoneware plate by Auguste Delaherche presents the peacock through one of its most potent visual fragments: the feather. Rather than depicting the bird itself, Delaherche isolates the iridescent eye-feather and allows it to unfurl across the circular field in a rhythmic arrangement of incised barbs, jewel-toned glazes, and atmospheric color.

The design is at once naturalistic and abstract. Three overlapping plumes occupy the surface, their radiating filaments spreading across the plate like Art Nouveau arabesques. The peacock “eyes” glow in pools of cobalt, blue-green, and malachite, while surrounding passages of crimson, green, and pale gray create an optical field that suggests both plumage and mineralized surface.

Delaherche is often associated with restrained forms, architectural silhouettes, and the powerful tonal effects of high-fired stoneware. This plate shows another side of his practice: a painterly command of line and color. The incised feather barbs give the composition structure, while the glazes soften and animate the surface, producing a shimmering effect that evokes peacock iridescence without resorting to literal representation.

The plate’s circular form is essential to its success. The feather motifs do not merely sit within the rim; they spiral and expand with the form, turning the charger into a field of arrested movement. The result recalls the asymmetrical cropping of Japanese design, where a fragment of nature can stand for a larger living presence.

As peacock imagery, the work carries strong fin-de-siècle resonance. Peacock feathers were associated with beauty, display, luxury, watchfulness, and Symbolist mystery. In Art Nouveau, the motif also offered artists an ideal subject for experiments in color, rhythm, and surface pattern. Delaherche’s version is distinctive in that it reduces the bird to its most emblematic trace while preserving the full force of its visual identity.

The model number “5773” places the plate within Delaherche’s atelier production and supports a date around 1900. Its combination of disciplined form, incised design, and intense polychrome glaze makes it a vivid example of Delaherche’s ability to balance control with chromatic freedom.

This plate represents the peacock through plumage alone, without figural depiction of the bird — an approach that translates the animal into pure decorative and symbolic essence. The feather becomes the zoological and artistic statement in its entirety.

Related Works

This plate should be considered alongside other peacock works in the Bestiaire. Clément Massier’s four-handled earthenware vase with iridescent peacock-feather decor (c. 1900, H 26.7 cm) shares Delaherche’s commitment to the feather as primary subject: the buttress handles themselves take the form of inverted feathers, and the entire surface is given over to the iridescent eye-feather motif in jewel-toned luster glaze. Where Delaherche achieves his effect through incised stoneware and polychrome glaze, Massier pursues the same subject through the liquid iridescence of his earthenware luster technique — two distinct ceramic traditions arriving at the same emblematic fragment. By contrast, Galileo Chini’s Vaso con pavoni for Fornaci San Lorenzo (c. 1906–10, H 55 cm) and Georg Friedrich Schmitt’s “Peacocks” vase for Orion and Zsolnay (c. 1904–05, H 26 cm) present the bird through figural representation — the peacock bodily present rather than evoked through its trace.

The object also belongs within a broader Art Nouveau fascination with peacock plumage across media, including glass, textiles, furniture, and ceramics. Its incised linear patterning recalls the way peacock feathers were translated into rhythmic decorative systems throughout the period.

Delaherche’s approach may be compared with contemporary ceramic experiments by Clément Massier, Jérôme Massier, and Émile Gallé, where iridescence, metallic effects, and high-color surfaces were used to evoke natural phenomena. Here, however, Delaherche achieves the impression through the discipline of high-fired stoneware rather than through luster alone.

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