Soft-Paste Porcelain Tea Service with Strawberry Decoration
English, ca. 1830
Soft-paste porcelain; teapot with cover, 7½ inches high

They are strawberries, although perhaps only just. Round orange fruit, angular green leaves, and wandering tendrils reduce the familiar plant to something approaching abstraction. Scattered freely across the service, they seem less like botanical specimens than playful suggestions of the real thing. Even the cobalt borders wander a little. That is much of the pleasure.

There is refinement here in the porcelain and the forms, but very little fussiness. The warm white body and generously rounded shapes give the service an almost sensuous quality, made livelier by those improbable little strawberries. The painter needed surprisingly little to tell us what we were looking at: fruit, leaves, stems, a few curling lines. Repeated from piece to piece, the vocabulary remains the same, but the hand never quite repeats itself.

SOLD