OTTOMAN TURKEY, CIRCA 1530

There is a simple elegance to the design of this bowl, typical of the so-called 'potter's style'. The cypress trees recall those on the bottle base formerly in the Jasim Homaizi collection and now in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik, the Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, p.164, no.304). They have the same meandering wavy lines articulating them. The exterior of the bowl is similar to that of a bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum attributed to 1530-40 (Atasoy and Raby, op.cit., p.108, no.134). The interior of that bowl, in contrast to ours, was decorated in a simple version of the tughrakes style.