Period: Regency
Maker: Hicks & Meigh
This superb cup and saucer were made by the Staffordshire pottery Hicks & Meigh (pronounced mee) in about 1822. The well of the saucer, and bottom of the cup, are painted with rustic figures. The gilding is of high quality. The ’empire’ cup has a fan-shaped handle.
The factory was comparatively small and short-lived but produced “amongst the finest of English bone china,” Geoffrey Godden wrote in a chapter about Hicks & Meigh in Staffordshire Porcelain.
Hicks & Meigh operated between 1806 and 1822 when another partner joined the business. Hicks, Meigh & Johnson lasted until 1835.
The first reference to Hicks & Meigh porcelains is in 1816, in a purchase order from Minton, and Godden speculated that Hicks & Meigh may have hired Minton porcelain painters and potters when Minton temporarily ceased producing porcelain between 1816 and 1824.
The distinctive fan-shape handle and graceful profile of the cup are identical to a Hicks & Meigh coffee cup, pattern number 1379, in Michael Berthoud’s A Compendium of British Cups (Plate 627). The only marks on our cup and saucer are the pattern number 1419.
The sophisticated decoration is a Hicks & Meigh version of what has become known by collectors as the ‘841 pattern,’ originally a reference to porcelains made by James & Ralph Clews.
Berthoud described the pattern’s basic elements as “a deeply scalloped blue border containing roughly rectangular yellow panels containing a gilt flower or anthemion.” He discovered ten different version and “established that at least sixteen different factories used it in some form or other.” (The Hicks & Meigh version evidently was not among Berthoud’s discoveries, for its yellow panels contain not an anthemion or a flower, but a gilt palm frond.)
We shall also be listing several 841-pattern Clews porcelains.
Condition: The cup is in mint condition. The saucer has very minor wear to gilding on the rim and along the border, probably caused by stacking or cleaning. On the bottom there is a tiny (2mm) chip to the foot rim.
Cup Height, with handle: 8.3 cm; Rim diameter: 7.7 cm; Width, with handle: 9.1 cm
Saucer Diameter: 14.4 cm
Weight: 220 g
Medium: Bone china (porcelain)
Origin: Stoke-on-Trent, England
