Staffordshire slipware dishes owe their distinctive character to virtuoso slip-trailing and highly stylized images. The fronts were usually coated with white slip onto which the design was trailed in light and dark red, and sometimes dotted in white. Then powdered lead ore was sprinkled over the surface to produce a yellowish glaze. During firing the decoration sometimes blurred, but on this example the trailing has remained wonderfully crisp. The couple probably represent Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, who were married in 1662. The trellis border is typical of Staffordshire dishes, but occasionally radiating heads or tulips were trailed round the rims.

Thomas Toft is the best known of the seventeenth-century Staffordshire slipware potters, but very little is known about his life. He was probably the Thomas Toft who married in 1663, paid Hearth Tax at the village of Stanley in 1663 and 1666 and was buried at Stoke on 3 December 1689. Over thirty signed dishes have been recorded but a few of them may have been made by his son, also Thomas Toft. What Toft senior made other than dishes is largely conjectural. Only four pieces of hollow ware bearing his name are known, among them a small jug in the Fitzwilliam Museum (c. 1–1937).