Published Catalogue Text: In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art , written 2013
46, 47, 48
Three small bowls of “Gombroon ware”
Iran, Safavid period, late 17th–early 18th century
Fritware pierced and painted with blue (cobalt) and black (chromium) under clear alkali glaze
6.7 × 18.5 cm (2 5/8 × 7 5/16 in.)
2002.50.116
Fritware pierced and painted with black (chromium) under clear alkali glaze
4.5 × 14.1 cm (1 3/4 × 5 9/16 in.)
2002.50.117
Fritware pierced and painted with black (chromium) under clear alkali glaze
4.2 × 12.6 cm (1 5/8 × 4 15/16 in.)
2002.50.118
With their exceptionally thin potting and near-translucent, pure white fabric, these three small bowls belong to a category of fine ceramics popularly known as “Gombroon wares.” Each bowl has rounded walls, a slightly everted rim, and a low foot ring glazed in the center. A small depression inside the foot ring perfectly fits the middle finger, ensuring that the bowl balances easily in the user’s hand. On the interior of the bowl, this depression forms a small boss, on or around which the underglaze painting is applied. The delicate potting is emphasized by openwork patterns pierced through the walls and filled with clear glaze, reviving a technique practiced in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries (and see also cat. 139).[1]
The two smaller bowls were broken and have been put back together, with small plaster fills in the walls. The designation “Gombroon wares” reflects the impact of European trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These vessels were exported to Europe from an Iranian port town at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, Bandar Abbas, which was known to the European trading companies as Gombroon, Gamrun, or Gamru.[2] From European primary sources and a handful of dated objects, it can be deduced that the production period for Gombroon wares stretched from at least the 1690s into the early 1800s.[3]
Bandar Abbas served as the terminal point of trade routes originating at Yazd and Kirman to the north and Lar, Shiraz, and Isfahan to the northwest.[4] It has been suggested that the production site for these wares was Nain (a small town due east of Isfahan), where a similar highly vitrified fritware was made in the nineteenth century.[5]
Mary McWilliams
[1] For an early discussion of what is often called “rice-grain” patterning and its relationship to Islamic, Chinese, and Japanese ceramics, see Hobson 1907, 84, 89.
[2] Lane 1957, 109–11. More exacting, Lane termed these ceramics “unidentified fine white wares.”
[3] Fehérvári 2000, 292; Lane 1957, 122–23. Hobson 1907, 89, does not, however, associate these wares with Gombroon.
[4] Lockhart 1960.
[5] This was proposed by Géza Fehérvári (see Fehérvári 2000, 292).
