An extremely rare and highly important Chelsea porcelain Chinoiserie Hexagonal Teapot and Cover of the raised Anchor period of Manufacture, with applied looped handle and straight spout. Beautifully enamelled in the rarest famille rose palette in bold flamboyant tones of iron red, orange, yellow, puce and green with flowering peonies in full bloom and their leaves issuing from a brightly coloured fence and a scholar’s rock in the foreground and similar stylised large Chinese inspired blooms on the other, beneath an oriental scrolled border framing panels of imitation shagreen and floral panels reserved on a background of turquoise diaper. The raised panelled Cover with matching formal segmented famille rose decoration framing further stylised flowering peonies, the rising formal flower finial enriched with puce petals. The underside of the base shows three large thumb marks of the potter of the piece.

Dr F Severne Mackenna, justly proud of his exceptionally rare Teapot, states that Dr Bellamy Gardner declared this to be ‘the rarest of all Chelsea Patterns’ and that ‘Nothing could exceed the charm and delicacy of this adaption of a famille rose design’. In Dr F Severne Mackenna’s own personal volume of his Chelsea Collection held now by the Haughton Gallery, he states that a heavily damaged Teapot of this pattern (the handle was reattached and the spout missing) was owned by Simon Goldblatt and was Exhibited in the Tea Centre Exhibition of 1949. Another surfaced in the 1950’s but even more damaged.

A lobed plate of large size is within the British Museum, see Elizabeth Adams, ‘Chelsea Porcelain’, fig 7.22, with a very similar pattern to this teapot but with butterflies rather than birds amidst the flowering oriental plants, but exactly the same border.

Illustrated:

 in Dr F Severne Mackenna, ‘Chelsea Porcelain, The Triangle and Raised Anchor Wares.’ pl.20, no. 46.

Apollo Magazine, November 1942.

Apollo Magazine, July 1944.