Anna Burnside
Head of Sale
Lot 127
An important early creamware coffee cup, circa 1745-48
1 December 2025, 13:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£1,500 - £2,500
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Jim Peake
Head of Department
Fergus Gambon
Director
An important early creamware coffee cup, circa 1745-48
Attributed to Samuel Bell's factory, Newcastle-under-Lyme, of crabstock form with a gnarled branch forming the handle and embossed with blossoming branches picked out in cold gilding, 5.8cm high
Footnotes
Provenance
Watney Collection
Tom Walford Collection, Bonhams, 18 December 2012, lot 15
Literature
Bemrose, Paul, 'The Pomona Potworks, Newcastle, Staffs', ECC Trans, Vol.9, Pt.1, 1973, pl.9(b)
White, Mary, Eating at the Whites' House, Vol.2, 2021, p.312, fig.d
Exhibited
ECC, Limehouse Ware Revealed, 1993, p.65, figs.138 and 140
This significant cup is illustrated alongside cups of similar form in Limehouse porcelain, together with matching shards from the Pomona Potworks and Limehouse sites, in the ECC's Limehouse Ware Revealed. Its distinctive shape provides an important link between porcelain manufacture at Limehouse and the earthenware manufactory at Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, where Samuel Bell had made a wide variety of earthenwares between 1724 and his death in December 1744, after which the factory was advertised to let. The factory was subsequently inherited by his brother John and a let notice in 1746 suggests that an agreement was reached in 1744 or 1745 for William Steers to occupy it, presumably to continue producing pottery, see Paul Bemrose, 1973, p.4.
It is during this period that experimental soft-paste porcelain appears to have been first produced at the site and the discovery of experimental porcelain on the Pomona Potworks site is evidence of a failed venture by a potter who had previously worked at Limehouse. The Limehouse factory closed in around 1748 and its owner Joseph Wilson subsequently worked in pottery and experimental porcelain at Pomona, following the departure of Steers from the Pomona Potworks around the same time. Another creamware cup of this form is illustrated by Robin Reilly, Wedgwood I, 1989, p.154, pl.101. Mary White illustrates this cup alongside a Limehouse porcelain example, lot 128 in this sale, and suggests that it may have formed the inspiration for the Limehouse examples.