A highly unusual hard-paste porcelain chocolate pot and cover. It is decorated with a pale turquoise ground and two quatrefoil reserves painted with polychrome landscapes. The cover is cylindrical and has gilt sides, with a hole in the top for the insertion of a plunger. The spout and handle are also gilt, the handle displaying the socket for the insertion of a further wooden extension.

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.