Dish with bouquets and flower sprays c. 1839

This is a porcelain dish decorated with floral motifs, made by Fabriek Dominique Denuelle, and currently held in the Rijksmuseum. The dish is oval, with a white ground decorated with colourful bouquets and scattered flower sprays. Gilding is applied around the rim in leaf-like shapes. The floral decoration is not organized in a symmetrical way, but scattered over the surface, which gives the impression of naturalness. The structure of this dish lies in its decorative tension between the idealized forms of the flowers and their seemingly random placement. This tension destabilizes any fixed meaning, engaging with new ways of perceiving decoration. The dish embodies a cultural code that values both artifice and an idealized version of nature. The formal quality of the piece, particularly the scattered distribution of flowers against the white ground, functions not just as aesthetic decoration but opens up to broader cultural and philosophical discourses around nature and representation.