Has Anyone Actually Ever Seen Queen Anne?!?!
Perusing the Propoganda Plates of the Stuart Restoration
I meant to finish writing this ages ago but I got too popular and did too many workshops (boohoo poor me i know)
I saw this Queen Anne plate up at Temple Newsam and fell in love with it.
If u know me then u know i love a good Princess Di plate so a plate of her ancestor Sarah Churchills’s bi lover (technically Princess Di was also related to Queen Anne but connecting the dots on that family tree into a family wreath is gonna spin my head so lets not.) is gonna make me happy to no end.
The plate is white delftware with primarily blue decoration with some green and yellow thrown in there for fun, and it depicts Queen Anne holding the sceptre and ball things for her coronation in 1702, so the plate dates from around then or a bit after as u wanna get ur coronation merch out quickly to ride the wave.
She’s not depicted outside the church though but out in nature which was probs an artistic choice to make it look prettier
Anne is shown to be dressed not too different to her 1702 coronation portrait by John Closterman
Her face looks…different…and while it is bound to look different on a smaller medium where its difficult to get the accuracy, it still makes her look less like Queen Anne than i’ve ever seen her. If it hadn’t been for the ‘A R’ above her head then i’d have not taken much notice cuz i wouldn’t have guessed it was her
She also seems to be smuggling two grapefruits in her bodice, which we don’t really see in any painting of her around the time. All this made me want to look into other plates of her and so here we are now a listicle of my fav daft Queen Anne plates
Before we jump into the list proper lets talk about the technical stuff to do with the plate
🏺 What is Delftware? 🏺
Delftware is the name for Dutch tin-glazed earthenware pottery - earthenware being pottery that has been fired below 1200 degrees and usually made from porcelain and bone china (yes the kinda stuff ur nan has in her fancy cabinet for the guests that never actually come for dinner) or terracotta and stoneware clay.
The specific technique of delftware is a Dutch technique refined in Antwerp in the 1500s but is by no means where tin-glazing began, with it’s roots being in Iraq in the 800s during the Islamic Golden Age cuz ofc it began there with those clever folks in Baghdad
Delftware was named for the city of Delft where the main production in Holland was and it seemed to reach the peak of it’s popularity and refinement in the first half of the 1700s, which was when Queen Anne reigned (1707 - 1714)
It favoured the blue and white colour scheme of Chinese and Japanese tin-glazed pottery as its base but does expand into other colours, particularly where floral patterns are concerned
This was also the time when the Dutch East India company would have been colonising and enslaving parts of Africa and India, as well as Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Delft would have been a major city for the Dutch East India company to work out of. It is safe to say the favouring of that colour scheme and style would have been due to the colonisation of those areas by the Dutch at this time, as much as it would have been influenced by the Italian tin-glazing techniques, which is what ppl seem to mention more as the influence but i don’t think we can really ignore the brutal colonisation of those areas and cultures that would have led to Delftware of this fashion.
England would have been just as guilty of this and we as is evident did produce our own delftware, mostly in London and in Bristol with the kinds of plates we’re lookin at now being mass produced for commemorative events
Ok so now lets talk Queen Anne Plates themselves and then more history afterwards, here are my top 5 daftest Queen Anne Plates
🍽️ Plate no. 1 🍽️
‘A’ being for ‘Anne’ and ‘R’ being for ‘Regina’ meaning Queen in Latin. She's in plain blue and white which is the iconic base colour scheme for delftware
This one is from Bonhams auction house and is estimated to be made around 1714 at the latest which was the year she stopped reigning cuz she died which would kinda put a stopper on anyone reigning really
ppl in early 1700s did not know to paint faces on plates omg and this isn't even the worst example! They've made her look oddly proportioned and given her boobs a 5 o'clock shadow (i mean, its a hairy trans femme mood) and the blue fade there doesn't really work as shading. like yeah it defines them and u can tell what they are but come on. It feels like more detail was given to her dress than her face which makes me wonder if the person painting this know what she looked like or was just told to paint the queen and went with a vague approximation that they had maybe seen from a distance
🍽️ Plate no. 2 🍽️
I am so confused if they are supposed to be her nipples pokin out of her dress or what. If they are, then whyyy??? There has been no care taken at all with this and little respect. It feels as though this was maybe rushed out for market as quickly as possible. Either that or the person making it really didn't like Queen Anne. Or maybe even they had just never seen a woman before and just had to guess.
Her dress doesn't even make sense and neither does the shading so I just really don't know what was going on here. The figure of Queen Anne is framed again by a nice and neat plate boarder, so it's not like they couldn't do neat and tidy 🤷♀️
🍽️ Plate no. 3 🍽️
This one confuses me even more! Are the plates supposed to be satire? I think the real answer lies in that they were so stylised and mass produced by hand that they eventually look less and less like the person they are supposed to resemble and just look more and more like a parody of the plate that was made moments before it.
Her shoulders are so round that they seem to join with the bottom of her tits rather than her arms! The dress is attached to her? Somehow? I can’t work out what the small V shapes on her chest are as there is already a necklace up by her neck and her boobs are already defined with lines and weird shading as if she is lit from below (which no one should ever be).
They have given her collar bone shading which looks so weird when her shoulders are so disproportionate and this whole plate is just one decision after another that there is no rhyme or reason for
🍽️ Plate no. 4 🍽️
(sorry the image is a bit crispy. blame the ashmolean museum not me)
This one is somehow worse than the last! why are her boobs curling out from her neck?! i am beginning to wonder if the cis men making these ever saw a cis woman let alone Queen Anne! Also the fact that her boobs are just fully out in this one is wild.
There seems to be some sort of pendant between her curly boobs which could be similar to what they were trying to do in the last one, altho this has nowt holding it up other than the curly boobs. Her hand(?) is also poking out from her cloak(?) before her body abruptly cuts off to give way to the on-its-side green cresent moon
I can work out most desicions taken with these plates even if I don’t like them but the ones taken here are genuinley non-sensical
🍽️ Plate no. 5 🍽️
I know there is a lot of inbreeding with the royals but there is no way Queen Anne had a forehead that large! That being said this is probably the most respectful i’ve seen other than the first one i saw at Temple Newsam.
Her tits are not out and her nipples not exposed. Aside from the forehead she’s actually pretty well proportioned and this looks the most like her coronation portraits. She’s even got a pretty nature Zoom Meeting background. The sceptre and ball-thingy as well as the crown are clearly shown and coloured, while her dress has a lovely amount of detail and shading that actually works and communicates shape and depth like its supposed to
The background shows trees, reeds and grass and also a gate in the background (altho it could be a tree gone wrong) which makes it feel like it is more in the country than on any sort of royal garden which would have been much more tidy and coiffured
👸🍽️Plates as Propaganda🍽️👸
I mentioned with Plate 3 that it looked more like a stylised representation than an actual picture of Queen Anne and that actually wouldn’t be far from the truth. These plates were often based on etchings cuz SPOILER: regular ppl like the ones makin these plates would never have seen Queen Anne.
They were relatively mass produced for what they were and that is all to do with class cuz ofc it is
These specific propaganda plates for the english monarchy actually starts at the beginning of The Restoration when Charles II was plopped on the throne and most of the middle classes and up wanted to show they supported the new monarchy. The easiest way to do that was to have a plate with the monarch on that you could hang on the wall or even bring out on special occasions to show off.
And these plates were not cheap! Despite the dodgy designs sometimes making them look lower quality, they were actually pretty expensive and were specifically designed for ages middle class and up who had that disposable income or ill gotten gains (cuz many were making money off shit like slavery in some way).
The plates do look of lower quality cuz this is a case of things being Made In England being shoddier than overseas counterparts. We were nowhere near as good as the Dutch at this!
What about these engravings they would have been based on then?
Well we have already seen the most famous portrait of her and how that looks similar but we also get ones like this
Which could easily be what her head on Plate 5 is based on. An engraving by Michael Vandergucht which is in turn copied from a portrait by Godfrey Kneller. So, the plates are copies of copies which makes it even less surprising they look so clapped half the time!
“But what about the nipples?!”
Excellent question!
A fashion of the time was to rouge ur nipples to make them look larger and stick out of ur bodice. While we got no evidence that Queen Anne actually did this, it would make sense that propaganda would want to show her being fashionable. This would especially be the case given that Queen Anne was not considered a pretty royal (which is bullshit) so in an absence of what whatever constituted as fashionable but natural beauty in 1700s to set trends, they show her keeping up with trends, so its nips out for the masses I guess.
🍽️ A Parting Plate 🍽️
This trend with the plates hasn’t stopped since. We can follow the plates all the way down to recent years with there being innumerable of Big Liz II and some of Charlie III inevitably floating about, but in my not some humble opinion dear reader, nothing will ever beat Ar Di
(Yes that is my Princess Diana plate I have in my kitchen)