This dish reproduces a French lead–glazed earthenware dish of a pattern once attributed to the great French potter, Bernard Palissy (c. 1510–90), but probably made by Claude Berthélémy at Fontainebleau, south of Paris, in the early seventeenth century. Claude Beaulat, a potter who had worked there around 1600, had become a merchant in London by 1621, and it seems probable that such dishes were imported by him or other members of the French merchant community. The shape and central scene, known as La Fécondité’ (fertility), were copied faithfully, but the addition of polychrome decoration painted on white tin–glaze, produced an entirely different effect from the richly coloured translucent lead glazes on the French models.

These tin-glazed dishes must have looked very handsome when displayed on dressers and they remained popular for many years. The earliest known tinglazed La Fécondité dish, dated 1633 and inscribed with the names of its owners ‘STEPHEN FORTVNE & ELIZABETH’, is in an American private collection. Several others, including the one Fitzwilliam's example, bear a date and the initials of a man and wife. The latest surviving examples, in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, both painted in blue instead of polychrome, were made in 1697, long after Palissy ware had gone out of fashion.