A Marcolini period Meissen hard-paste porcelain covered milk jug of baluster shape with painted polychrome flowers on a white ground. It has a moulded handle and spout, the handle is in the form of branches. It is finished of with a puce edge.

Throughout the nineteenth century, florally decorated porcelain continued to be produced. The factory at Meissen, established in 1708 under the state control of the Electors of Saxony, continued to produce shapes and decoration which had been popular a century earlier. A composite tea service in the Royal Collection dates from the Marcolini period of the Meissen factory, between 1796 and 1814. It was purchased several decades after this by Alexandra, Princess of Wales, later Queen Alexandra, and placed on display in Marlborough House, the London home of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The garden flowers of roses, wallflowers, sweet peas and daisies, painted in loose bouquets, would have appealed to Alexandra’s taste in interior decoration; her boudoir at Marlborough House was home to a profusion of plants and porcelain, in common with many of the more public spaces.

Text adapted from Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden, London, 2015.