Anna Burnside
Head of Sale
Lot 185
An extremely rare Worcester twelve-sided teabowl, circa 1752
1 December 2025, 13:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£4,000 - £6,000
Ask about this lot
Jim Peake
Head of Department
Fergus Gambon
Director
An extremely rare Worcester twelve-sided teabowl, circa 1752
Sharply moulded with concave flutes, 'trekked' in a dark outline and washed in a brighter tone of blue, with a bridge linking a pagoda to an island populated with stilted huts, birds swimming and flying above, the reverse with a vignette of a strange rock issuing spiky foliage, a panelled diaper border below the rim, 8cm wide, 4.8cm high
Footnotes
Provenance
Watney Collection, Phillips, 22 September 1999, lot 143
Beechwood Collection, Simon Spero exhibition, 2016, no.22
Literature
White, Mary, Drinking at the Whites' House, Vol.2, 2021, p.356, fig.b
This is one of only two recorded twelve-fluted teabowls decorated in underglaze blue. The second example was in the Pauline and David Tate Collection sold by Bonhams on 19 June 2024, lot 350. Although painted with a different Chinese landscape and border, the distinctive 'trekked' style of decoration links the three. Although no corresponding saucers in underglaze blue are known to exist, the present lot should be compared with lot 178 in this sale, a teabowl and saucer of the same form with polychrome enamel decoration. The glaze of this blue and white teabowl is greyish-white compared with the creamier appearance of the polychrome version. It has been suggested that this was in order to more closely imitate Chinese hard-paste porcelain. It is likely that blue and white decoration proved too difficult to control on this sharply-fluted shape, and therefore Worcester's successful polychrome palette prevailed.