This is a rare and finely potted survival of part of a polychrome child’s tea service in English delftware. It comprises a teapot and cover, a teabowl and saucer, a sugar bowl and three further teabowls.

The purpose of such a service could be to teach children the norms of behaviour in polite society; the etiquette of the British tea ceremony could be as revealing as the Japanese in this respect.

Richard Pardue, in his study on Ceramics for Children, 1650-1835, notes:

“In summary, seventeenth-century Dutch and eighteenth-century British and American parents wanted their children to prosper and be refined members of polite society. The tea wares and other small-scale ceramics presented in the chapters that follow may have been used for casual play by the young or curiosities for adult amusement, but when viewed through the lens of material culture, they also served as a means through which parents taught their children to succeed in an adult world and carry themselves with proper refinement in polite society.”[i]

William Hogarth (1697 – 1764), A Children’s Tea Part
By permission of Amgueddfa Cymru — Museum Wales, NMW A 94

William Hogarth depicts a child’s tea party presided over by three sisters with their doll in which their spaniel upsets the tabel sending the tea service crashing to the ground.

detail

Such services are known in English porcelain, but few are known in delftware. Two blue and white services are known on from the Glaisher Collection[ii] in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and another from the Margaret Macfarlane Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Margaret Macfarlane Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Condition:
No restoration
The teapot: tiny chip to spout
The saucer: 3 chips
Teabowls: two in good order, two damages
The sugar bowl missing cover and crack and chips

References:

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

Pardue 2008
Rick Pardue, Ceramics for Children, 1650 – 1835, (The Toy Museum at Old Salem, 2008)

————————————————————————————————————–

[i] Pardue 2008, p. XX

[ii] Archer 2013, pp. 296-298, and Pardue 2008 fig. 1.6

Price: £14,500