Dinner Plate

CHINESE EXPORT PORCELAIN
Porcelain imported from China was wildly popular across the Americas. In 1573 alone, merchants in Acapulco imported more than twenty thousand porcelain objects on the Manila Galleon trading ships. With the introduction of dining rooms in Spanish American homes in the 1740s (before then, a table would be set in any room in the house), a demand arose for expensive Chinese export porcelain dinner services. The cost of ordering a complete custom-made service, like that of the marquis Ignacio Gómez de Cervantes, and shipping it to Mexico was extremely high, but porcelain teacups, plates, or ornaments of lesser quality were more accessible and found in the humblest Spanish American homes.

By the eighteenth century, wealthy individuals in British America such as the planter Samuel Vaughan in Jamaica also had the means to order costly china services decorated with the family arms directly from Asia (see octagonal soup plate). In the nascent United States, armorial porcelain was often replaced in popularity by objects featuring generic shield designs personalized with initials, such as the navy blue and gold dinner plate seen here.