A set of twelve pale turquoise and white hard-paste porcelain tea bowls and saucers. The bowls decorated on the front and reverse with two quatrefoil reserves depicting harbour scenes. The saucer displays one quatrefoil scene, also of a harbour. The reserve on the saucer is surrounded by a gilt arabesque/trellis border that is also present on the rim of the saucer and inside the rim of the bowl.

As the Meissen factory grew the artists began to turn not only to Chinese precedents but to introduce European motifs of decoration – landscape and harbour scenes derived from seventeenth-century French and Dutch paintings, European flowers and hunting and genre scenes became more common. This service combines European scenes with a delicate turquoise-green ground which may have been intended to resemble Chinese celadon porcelain in its hue.

Queen Caroline led the way in the acquisition of German and Chinese porcelains but Meissen porcelain was also mentioned in the accounts of Princess Augusta. In 1755, for example, a bill was charged by John Taylor, a china and glass dealer on Pall Mall, for packing and transporting Dresden china to Kew Palace.

Text adapted from The First Georgians; Art and Monarchy 1714 – 1760, London, 2014.