This is a French Haviland & Co Limoges hard paste porcelain (fine china) three piece covered butter dish with a pierced hole insert. The pattern is Old Blackberry. The date is circa 1876 – 1889.

The butter is 3 ½” high to the top of the finial and 5 ¼” by 5 ¼”; it is in a square shape.

There is gold trim on the finial which shows minimal age wear.

There are no chips, nicks, cracks or crazing. There may be a few glaze marks due to the manufacturing process.

The green underglaze mark is H&Co underscored by L. The blue overglaze factory decorating mark is Haviland & Co Limoges inside a double circle.

The descriptive text that follows, in which I write about Haviland’s pattern, Old Blackberry, will be repeated in all of the listings I have in which I am selling this specific dinnerware. You can do a search within my shop for “Haviland Old Blackberry” to view all of the listings.

Old Blackberry is a multifloral, or botanical transfer decoration of Haviland china, and produced mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. The worker at the factory had the freedom on how to decorate each piece with the cut-out transfers, given a few parameters so as to keep the dishes looking uniform within a set, but each piece within the set would be unique. This artistic freedom was mostly with respect to choice and placement.

Dr. Rorex undertook some research and identified the multiflorals in the following 12 patterns: 1)Blackberry, with stems, thorns, leaves, flowers and fruit; 2)Tulip, with leaves and with violets and ground ivy; 3)Morning glory; 4)Honeysuckle; 5)Poppy, with wheat, cornflowers and another French flower; 6)Anemone; 7)Double buttercup or Ranunculus; 8)Rose; 9)Carnation; 10)Chrysanthemum; 11)Coneflower and 12)Double Mock-Orange. All of these patterns make a multifloral pattern, and this specific multifloral is called Old Blackberry.

Any one dish may have several of the multifloral patterns. Not each dish may have a blackberry on it.

There is a color scheme, with some patterns having a more somber hue and other patterns having a brighter hue. The patterns are outlined in a dark brown. The major colors are tan, brown, ocher, pale blue, and brown-green. Sometimes the colors are a shaded variation, like pale gray instead of pale blue, or more yellow than tan. Not all colors may be on a dish, and if there is a set, if a pattern is repeated, the colors may be different for the pattern from one dish to the other dish so as to show the uniqueness of this decoration.

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