Happy Autumn! (or, if you are down under, happy Spring!) I hope everyone has had a beautiful summer in spite of the weather and the many troubles the world is going through - we can always find beauty in something after all. I have been away on holiday and feel refreshed to pick up my blog and instagram, and bring lots of beautiful new porcelain to you. In my last blog, before disappearing on holiday, I showed you my column in Homes & Antiques about the Derby factory, and tod

In my monthly column in Homes & Antiques, the last two months I wrote about the emerging porcelain factories in Chelsea and Bow (both in London). This month I am moving further north to the beautiful small city of Derby. The Derby factory was intimately linked to Chelsea and Bow; it was inspired by them, became an important competitor, and eventually ended up buying them and using much of their expertise to create its famous, top quality porcelain. Derby took British porcelai

When we think about times past, we often think people didn't have much colour - perhaps because pictures are black and white, and many paintings we have seen are so dirty that colours don't come through clearly. But the fact is that particularly in the Regency era there was an explosion of colour.⁠ These stunning Bloor Derby vases show that. They are from between 1800 and 1825, but given the style, probably from around 1815 or 1820. They are decorated in the French style with

It is summer here and we are finally having some freedom again, so I am enjoying the rare opportunity to go places. I have been visiting several galleries that have been closed for most of the past year and half. This week it was the Wallace Collection at Hertford House in London. A beautiful grand house that hosts one of the world's best collections of Baroque and Rococo art. Four generations of the Lords Hertford and their final heir Richard Wallace, have been collecting th

When in the late 18th and early 19th Century excavations in Southern Italy, Greece and Turkey started to reveal the long forgotten ancient history of the Etruscans, Romans and Greeks, this was very inspiring to people in Northern Europe. After many centuries of dominance of the Christian Church, this was a whole new world opening up. Here was a world full of gods and goddesses who were full of life, flawed, and passionate (and much of the time up to no good!) like humans. Peo

Last month I wrote in Homes & Antiques about the Chelsea factory, and this month I am moving across London to Bow, its sister factory that was so different, yet so interlinked. It is also closer to home, as my stockroom is just a few miles up the river from Bow - if I lean out of my window I can see the site where all these beautiful items were produced more than 250 years ago! The Bow factory brought some very important innovations to British porcelain, and unlike Chelsea, w

You had to go without a blog post last week as I was on holiday in Cornwall... but while there I came across something interesting. You will often have seen the mention of "acanthus" shapes in neo-Classical porcelain design of the early 19th Century. It was a very popular detail in design, inspired by the Greek, Roman and Etruscan art that became fashionable at the time. Acanthus is a plant that grows in the Mediterranean Basin and in Asia, and I had never seen a wild one in

This last month has been full of great sporting tournaments: the European football title, the Wimbledon tennis tournament, and of course the Tour de France, an epic cycling race all around France. Earlier this week the cyclists went past the city of Toulouse in the south of France, so I thought it fitting to show our very own Tour de France in porcelain: a set of Coalport plates from 1844 that are attributed to a painter called John Toulouse. Toulouse was a painter at the Coa

It is that time of the month; you can now read my latest column in Homes & Antiques, called "Made in Chelsea". This month I am writing about the first well-organised large porcelain factory in Britain: Chelsea Porcelain, and how an ambitious and talented Walloon immigrant called Nicholas Sprimont shaped the beginnings of British porcelain. One of the things I find fascinating in researching the journey of British porcelain is the rich mix of European and English styles, and a

You may know that I love a good porcelain figure... not the gaudy figures that you can find in a charity shop, but the true masterpieces made in the 18th Century by Bow, Chelsea or Derby. Because there are so many bad imitations around we have been conditioned to discard them as kitsch, but if you look closely at the masterpieces you will see that they are far from kitsch: they have an innocence and strength about them that is moving. And they were made so well, particularly