Winter flowers
Happy weekend! Today I have a very elegant tea service to show to you. It was made by New Hall around the year 1810, and it was made of the famous "hybrid hard paste porcelain". With a pattern consisting of beautiful hand painted flower baskets set in a mazarine blue and gilt border, this is a very modest yet elegant service that would look beautiful in any interior, whether traditional or modern.
The New Hall factory started as a cooperative of several Staffordshire potters in 1781, making use of the porcelain license of Bristol Porcelain Company after this went in demise. It quickly grew out to be a leading porcelain maker, and the first to make true porcelain in Staffordshire. New Hall is mostly known for its huge output of what became called "hybrid hard paste" porcelain.
New Hall had adapted the original hard paste recipe from Bristol in order to save on production costs - a frugal Staffordshire improvement on the first hard paste porcelain items, which were quite difficult and expensive to produce. Once Josiah Spode had standardised bone china, that quickly became the standard and hybrid hard paste disappeared. New Hall was late to take up bone china, but after 1814 they made it their main output, and they made some very high quality items.
This service, however, is still made of "hybrid hard paste" porcelain. You can tell this by the way the porcelain is less milky than bone china. The flower paintings are among the most charming I have seen! Each basket is completely different, and the style is slightly naive - but very generous in nature, making you feel there is a an abundance of flowers. That's what we need here in England, where we are in the depth of a freezing winter.
The service is unmarked, as was normal in that era, except the pattern number 611, but there are labels from which it is evident that the items have been exhibited in the New Hall Bicentenary exhibition in the Stoke-on-Trent Museum in 1871, which David Holgate then published a book about. It later belonged to the Frank Herrmann Collection. Herrmann was a British collector who owned a huge number of tea and dessert services of this era.
Where to find things
You can find all my tea services here, and all my available stock is here. If you always want to see the latest additions, follow me on Instagram... I post pictures and a story several times a week.
Happy new year to everyone, and get some flowers to make it through this cold winter!
This week's new treasures:
