An 18th Century London Decorated Chinese Export Porcelain Coffee Cup
An 18th Century London decorated Chinese Export Porcelain coffee cup c.1750-1760, enamelled in London between c.1755-1765. The moulded Chinese Export Porcelain cup was painted in London, probably in the James Giles workshop. Painted with a large sprigs of English flowers, butterflies and further scattered flowers.
SOLD
- Condition
- In excellent condition, there is a very small shallow chip to the footrim a nd a minute frit to the rim c.1 x 1mm.
- Size
- Height : 6.7 cm (2 2/3 inches)
- Provenance
- Robert McPherson Antiques 12th November 2007. The Helen Espir Collection of Over Decorated Chinese Porcelain.
- Stock number
- 24717
Photos
Information
The Helen Espir Collection of European Decorated Chinese Export Porcelain :
"a member of the Oriental Ceramic Society and collector, with her husband. Having made a typical collection of Song and provincial Ming blue and white, they decided to concentrate on what used to be called `clobbered` porcelain. She is the author of the standard work on the subject, European Decoration on Oriental Porcelain,2005, the first to examine the work of European decorators on Chinese porcelain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on enamellers in Holland, Germany and England. She has learned Chinese."
From Provenance ; Collectors, Dealers & Scholars : Chinese Ceramics in Britain & America (Roy Davids, Dominic Jellinek, Privately Printed, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9570148-0-0).
English Decoration on White Chinese Porcelain :
This type of English enamel decoration on Chinese export porcelain should be seen in a different way to what is referred to as `over-decorated` or `clobbered` porcelain. Those terms refer to Chinese porcelain that was imported into Europe as finished articles, but were either too plain for merchants to sell or their profits could be enhanced by adding enamels over the existing Chinese decoration. The present example was plain white when it arrived in England, it would not have been salable and so no merchant would have ordered it to retail. However, James Giles must have ordered allot of white porcelain specifically for decoration at his workshop in London. The shapes ordered were the lasted fashion in Europe as was the decoration he added. To my mind this makes these objects separate and distinct from other Chinese porcelain, China only provided the blank `canvas` and even that was of a form dictated to by Europe. For this reason these objects could primarily be see as English, they would have been totally alien to the Chinese.