Date: circa 1810
Period: Regency
Maker: Miles Mason
This beautiful cup and saucer by Miles Mason provides a tantalizing insight into taste, fashion and pastimes in the age of Jane Austen.
The intimate domestic scenes come from a series of sentimental mother-and-child watercolours and engravings made between 1807 and 1808 by Adam Buck, a fashionable painter. He was much influenced by ancient Greek art. The mother is dressed in a flowing Greek-style gown of muslin. In the saucer image, she is seated on a Greek-style divan, playing battledore, a forerunner of badminton, with her child. On the cup, the mother is either putting on, or removing, a harness to a toy chariot, on which the child is seated with a whip in one hand.
The images are ‘bat printed’ in lilac. This process involved oiling a copper plate engraving, and then transferring the sticky oil pattern to the glazed porcelain with a pliable pad of glue or gelatin called a ‘bat.’ Powdered enamel for colouring was then applied to the sticky pattern, using cotton wool, and the porcelain then fired in an enamel kiln. Beautiful images could be produced, as finely drawn and stippled as the original engraving. The clarity and subtlety of tonal gradation on this Miles Mason cup and saucer are remarkable.
There are no identifying marks but we know Miles Mason was the maker thanks to the characteristic handle and the quality of the bat printing. Miles Mason imported porcelain from China before starting to produce his own from about 1803.
Condition: The cup is perfect. The saucer is close to 100%. There is a tiny nibble on the foot rim of the saucer,normally unseen.
Cup Height: 5.5 cm; Rim diameter: 8.3 cm; Width with handle: 10 cm; Saucer Diameter: 14.4 cm
Weight: 246 g
Origin: Stoke-on-Trent, England
Medium: Bone china (porcelain)
