Inscribed on the exterior with three verses in numbered panels, reading:

Come here’s windy Wefton
with all it’s brave Yeomen
That we Never may want
Rum  Sugar & Lemon

To Drink good Succefs
and with that we may
Have our Barn’s well stored
with good Corn & Hay,

On a Rock we are founded
much better then sand
Come drink about Brother’s
two glafs’es in hand

‘Windy Weston’ was a popular name for Weston-super-Mare, a seaside town on the windswept Bristol Channel, 20 miles south of Bristol.

The interior is unusually finely painted with a scene taken from a broadside of 1740 of the taking of Portobello by Admiral Vernon on 22 November 1739 with a description of the event by Willian Richardson, a volunteer on Vernon’s flagship, The Burford.

Bristol played a leading role in the hugely profitable Triangular Trade in which British trade goods such as guns, metals and cloth were exchanged for enslaved people in West Africa who were then taken to the Caribbean and the Americas. The ships returned to Bristol with plantation products such as sugar, rum and tobacco. Rum, sugar and lemon along with spices were the essential ingredients of punch.

A Perspective View of the Harbour, Castles, and Town of Porto Bello
A broadside of 1740. The British Museum (BM 1934,0217.69)

Other punch bowls are known with the same central scene, but not painted with quite such care as our bowl. An example in the City Art Gallery, Manchester (Greg 276) is dated 1743[i], and another with martial trophies was sold at Bonhams, 14 April, 2010, lot 4.  Michael Archer argued that another in the Glaisher Collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, should be attributed to Liverpool, but the connection with Weston-Super-Mare on our bowl points to a Bristol origin.[ii]

Peter Monamy (attr.), The Capture of Portobello by Admiral Vernon with Only Six Men o’War November 1739
National Trust, Shugborough Hall

Condition:
Broken and restuck

Provenance:
J & J May
Peter Higgins Collection 

References:

Archer 2013
Michael Archer, Delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013)

Lipski & Archer 1984
Louis L. Lipski and Michael Archer, Dated English Delftware, London: Sotheby Publications (1984)

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[i] Lipski & Archer, p. 257, no. 1110.

[ii] Archer 2013, p. 251 & 252, no. F.27.

Price: £12,500