Iznik pottery

R. L. Hobson describes a new and striking style of pottery decoration that developed in the Ottoman lands towards the middle of the sixteenth century, marked by bold designs of naturalistic flowers, after an earlier Turkish ware dominated by arabesques and stylised flowers influenced by Chinese porcelain. ¹

• Group I: a brilliant tomato red with blue, leaf green, turquoise and black outlines, and naturalistic flowers in which the rose, carnation, tulip, hyacinth and others can be recognised, alongside cypress trees out of scale and feathery leaves. ¹ The red is made from a clay called Armenian bole and applied as a thick slip. ^{3 4}
• Group II: long known as "Damascus ware", with manganese purple in place of the red and a sage or verdigris green. ^{1 5}
• Group III: similar designs in two shades of blue. ⁵

The body is the same in all three, a fine-grained sandy material dressed with white slip, painted and covered with a clear siliceous glaze. ⁵

• Hobson says the name "Rhodian" arose from pieces found at Lindos on Rhodes and that the fallacy had been exposed many times. ⁵
• "Damascus ware" went unchallenged until 1909, when F. R. Martin questioned it; Martin had seen thousands of Group II tiles in the baths of Bursa restored by Rustem Pasha and reported more fragments of "Damascus" plates at Iznik than anywhere else. ^{5 6 7}
• He cites Migeon and Sakisian's quotation of Gerlach (1577) on an order for tiles from Nicaea, Sultan Murad III's order of 1589 to the magistrate of Nicaea to hasten tiles for a new pavilion in Istanbul, and the chronicler Sa'd al-Din's statement that the clay of Nicaea produced vessels hard to tell from Chinese porcelain. ⁶
• He reports Evliya Çelebi's statement that the town's potters' workshops, three hundred under Ahmad Khan, had shrunk to nine quarters and been ruined by persecutions. ^{6 7}

He concludes that all three groups were probably made at Iznik, though not necessarily there alone, and that it is safest to call them all "Turkish". ^{2 3}