The rest of the service, E & H Manners 1999

We retained this teabowl and saucer as a memento from a part service that we had in 1999. Uniquely for Jefferyes Hammet O’Neale each piece was marked with a number which referred to the fable in the Reverend Samuel Croxall’s celebrated Croxall’s Fables of Aesop first published 1722 and subsequently much reprinted. O’Neale adapted the rather clumsy woodcuts of Croxall which were published in some versions of The Ladies Amusement.

No. 1 ‘The cock and the Jewel’, The Ladies Amusement, pl. 102

No. 82 ‘The Lion and the Frog’, The Ladies Amusement, pl. 110

The distinctive gilt border of linked palmettes, alternatively long and short, pointing inwards, is one of those used at the Giles workshop.  The same border is found on one of the Worcester ‘Grubbe’ plates (V & A, C.877-1935) that were given to the Victoria and Albert Museum by Mrs Dora E. Grubbe in 1935, who said that they had been decorated by an ancestor of her husband, a descendant of James Giles.[i]

[i] For a discussion of these famous plates, see Mallet 2012

Condition:
Saucer broken across and restuck, chip to reverse; teabowl broken and restuck; losses to the gilding

Provenance:

Sotheby’s, London, 13 September 1999, lot 153

Literature:

Hanscombe 2010
Stephen Hanscombe, Jefferyes Hamett O’Neale, China Painter and Illustrator, (London: Stockspring Antiques 2010), p. 90, no. 75

Mallet 2012
J.V.G. Mallet, ‘Further thoughts on the Grubbe Plates’, Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle, 2012, vol. 23, pp. 213-229

References:

O’Connell 2021
Sheila O’Connell, ‘Jefferyes Hamett O’Neale (fl.1750-1801): porcelain painter and print designer’. In:  Pots, Prints and Politics: Ceramics with an Agenda, from the 14th to the 20th Century, Patricia Ferguson (Ed.), British Museum Research Publications, vol. 229, 2021, pp. 109-115, fig. 145 p. 110

Hanscombe 2010
Stephen Hanscombe, Jefferyes Hamett O’Neale, China Painter and Illustrator, (Stockspring Antiques, London, 2010)

E&H Manners 2024
‘Decorators of Glass and Ceramics’, 2024, no. 64

Price: £1,800