A pair of white gombroon dishes, Persia, 17th century

'Gombroon' ware is called after the former name of the port of Bandar Abbas, where the Dutch East India Company had a trading-station, from which various types of Persian pottery were shipped to Europe. It employs the archaising technique of cutting a design into the leather-hard white paste walls of the vessel, which is then covered in the characteristic transparent glaze. The effect produced closely resembles porcelain and is summed up by Lane 1957, p.110 as 'fine-grained, very translucent, and almost perfectly vitrified ... the brilliant, colourless glaze thick and very glassy.'