Cabinet plate

This cabinet plate, from the ‘Māori Art Ware’ series, was made by Royal Doulton Ltd in about 1925. It is entirely glazed in bright yellow, and the ledge features a bold border pattern in black and rust derived from kōwhaiwhai painting. The central well has been transfer printed with a photographic print of a Māori woman and a child wrapped in a cloak, surrounded by a circular frame of tattooed masks and ovals featuring the words ‘KIA ORA’. 

Royal Doulton in New Zealand

Doulton ceramics were enormously popular in Aotearoa from the 1840s, and it was suggested in the 1990s that two out of every three New Zealand homes contained at least one Doulton product. Consumer tastes in New Zealand were largely driven by British trends, but from 1905 Royal Doulton did produce a distinctly local ‘Māori ware’ series incorporating kōwhaiwhai patterns, hei tiki and other Māori motifs.

This later series, known as ‘Māori Art Ware’, was designed for the New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition in Dunedin in 1925-26. Kōwhaiwhai borders were used to frame New Zealand images including a farmer, a soldier, a fern forest, and this photograph of a Māori mother and her child.

Andrew Paul Wood argues in his article on Doulton’s Māori themed wares that they catered to the ‘curio economy’, creating mass market products for those wanting to demonstrate connoisseurship and belonging through the acquisition of ethnological ‘curios’. By the late twentieth century such cavalier commodification of Māori culture was no longer considered acceptable, and the last Doulton design to feature Māori subjects was discontinued in 1975.
 
Further Reading

Quérée, Jennifer. 1993. Royal Doulton. Christchurch: Canterbury Museum.

Wood, Andrew Paul. 2023. ‘Royal Doulton “Māori / Kia Ora Ware”, “Māori Art Ware” and the New Zealand Context’. Journal of the Northern Ceramics Society, 39: 93-123.