Royal Doulton | Gnomes Series | D4697 | Porcelain Bowl | c.1925–1950

There is something quietly subversive about a luxury ceramic decorated with creatures that live under tree roots — as though the maker wanted to remind the drawing room that the world it shut out was older and stranger than it preferred to think.

Royal Doulton's Series Ware programme, developed under the creative direction of Charles Noke from the late nineteenth century onwards, produced some of the most distinctive and collectable decorative ceramics of the early twentieth century. The programme applied narrative and illustrative decoration to a wide range of domestic forms — plates, bowls, vases, jugs and trays — drawing on literary sources, folklore, sporting subjects and the visual language of contemporary illustration. The Gnomes series, pattern number D4697, was introduced around 1925 and remained in production until approximately 1950, depicting pointed-hatted gnomes or elves gathered in woodland settings among toadstools, cobwebs and stars. The imagery draws heavily on the tradition of British and northern European fairy illustration that reached its peak in the first decades of the twentieth century, a tradition closely associated with the work of Arthur Rackham — whose atmospheric woodland scenes, populated by gnarled trees and knowing, angular fairy folk, provided the visual vocabulary from which Charles Noke's gnome series clearly drew. The result is a body of Series Ware that captures the mood of the Edwardian and interwar fairy illustration tradition with considerable fidelity and considerable style.

The bowl is of generous oval form with a shaped and scalloped rim. The interior is decorated across its full surface in the Gnomes pattern: a central scene depicting a group of five gnomes or elves seated and gathered beneath the massive exposed roots of an ancient tree, each wearing a tall pointed hat in a different colour — green, orange, red, grey and white. The woodland floor around them is strewn with toadstools in red and yellow, and the background opens to a deep cobalt blue night sky scattered with gold stars. The border and ground are worked in a warm golden-ochre lustre, with gilded cobweb details extending across the surface. The exterior carries the cobalt blue ground of the night sky continuing over the rim.

There are no chips, cracks, crazing or gilding loss. The piece is in excellent condition throughout, with the gilded cobweb and star decoration fully intact.

Key Details

• Maker: Royal Doulton
• Series: Gnomes Series Ware
• Pattern Number: D4697 — researcher-confirmed from decoration; backstamp not examined
• Designer: Charles Noke
• Form: Oval scalloped bowl
• Material: Porcelain
• Period: c.1925–1950
• Condition: Excellent

The gnomes have been sitting under that tree root for the better part of a century, and they show no sign of leaving — which, given the quality of the piece that contains them, seems entirely reasonable.