A very large and Important Chelsea Porcelain Silver Shaped Dish, of oval shape with moulded shell shaped thumb pieces. Beautifully decorated in a full and lavish palette by Jefferyes Hamett O’Neale with the Fable of ‘The Lamb brought up by a Goat’. The scene showing a Wolf standing in the foreground next to a lamb and a horned Goat, before a group of trees within a river landscape and distant hills, beneath an expansive sky with puce, blue and grey clouds and with flocks of birds in flight in the sky. Framed in the foreground with characteristic ‘Vandyke brown’ rocks. Surrounding the central oval scene are full bouquets of European flowers including roses, phlox, speedwell, scented stocks and sunflowers and other lesser bouquets and floral sprigs, within a brown line rim.

Jeffereys Hamett O'Neale, was an Irish miniaturist of enormous skill. He practised for many years in London as a miniature-painter, and exhibited occasionally with the Incorporated Society of Artists, of which he was a fellow, being one of the artists who signed the declaration roll in 1766

His work at the Chelsea porcelain manufactory is hugely rare and it is where he made a name for himself painting Fables of animals after Aesop’s Greek original stories. His style often renders the animals with human characteristics, where they often appear to be in conversation with each other.

Dr F Severne MacKenna notes of the Chelsea Fable decoration that,’they have been identified in the majority of instances and there is a perennial delight in discovering for oneself the original engraving from which any given scene was derived adapted. This scene is taken from Samuel Croxhall’s 1722 edition of Aesop’s Fables, he was the Dean of Hereford and dedicated his publication to the son of the Earl of Halifax. Elizabeth Adams notes that ‘the illustrations were adapted rather than copied, the backgrounds being frequently simplified, while the poses of the animals were sometimes modified to suit the design, or the shape of the ware on which they were to be rendered.’ This size of the silver shaped dish, designed and effected as a silver original by Nicholas Sprimont himself, is the largest made at Chelsea of this specific form.

Fable XX Aesop, translated by Croxall and published 1722.