Mid Century Vallauris Style Pottery Dish in Emerald Green with Rope Rim

This is the Riviera in a dish. Bright emerald green, a rim of coiled clay rope looped and pierced into open scallops, and a ring of little applied beads where each loop meets the bowl. It is the kind of thing that came home from a holiday in the South of France in the 1950s and 60s, when the potteries of Vallauris and the surrounding villages were turning out hand built decorative ceramics by the crateload for a public newly obsessed with colour and Mediterranean living.

The rope rim is the signature of the style. The rope design is a classic motif of the Vallauris potteries, which were at their heyday in the 1960s, and larger examples with maker's marks now change hands for serious money. This one is unmarked, which is common for the smaller ateliers, so we describe it as Vallauris style rather than Vallauris outright. The construction tells the story anyway: every coil has been rolled and laid by hand, so no two loops are quite alike. 

The dish measures 29 cm across and stands 7 cm high on a short foot, with a smooth glazed well in the centre and the rope work standing proud around it. The glaze is deep and glossy, pooling darker in the recesses in the way this period's green glazes do. The base is left unglazed, showing warm terracotta clay. The rope work has held up well, with the usual light softening to the raised edges that you would expect from sixty odd years of use.

We would put it on a hall table for keys and post, where the green will lift a neutral scheme, or in the centre of a dining table with lemons or a few pears piled in the well. It works beautifully with other greens, so try it on a shelf with green glass, majolica leaf plates or a Wedgwood cabbage ware jug. If you already have one of our Vallauris style pieces, this is the one to sit beside it.