Museum number
2019.315b
Object
Saucer (with Chinese coffee cup), Bow Porcelain Factory, soft-paste porcelain, c.1755
Description
the centre painted with a figure riding a donkey within a pale-yellow ogival cartouche surrounded by flowering brancehs with grey-green foliage, within a pale cell and trellis-pattern rim, reserved with flowerheads, the coffee-cup in a stronger palette. It seems quite probable that the Bow saucer was made as a replacement to complete a Chinese service of a slightly earlier date.
Materials
soft-paste porcelain
On display?
No

Further description

Simple name
saucer
Founded in the mid-1740s, the Bow factory, located in Bow, now East London, was the first English manufacturer to make porcelain on a commercial scale. Bow porcelain was largely aimed at the middle-classes. Famous for its imitations of imported Chinese and Japanese porcelain, the factory also produced some of the earliest full-length figures in English porcelain. From the 1760s the quality declined and the factory closed around 1774. The factory’s legacy lives on as its use of bone ash in the manufacture of porcelain evolved into what we know as English bone china.

Please help us improve our records. Let us know if there are any errors by writing to curators@holburne.org