A very Rare Pair of Chelsea Porcelain Finger Bowls or Water Cups. Each bowl of slightly baluster form with delicately everted rims, painted with butterflies, caterpillars and scattered insects, including a May Bug, above a band of overlapping water leaves painted in shades of green and yellow, with turquoise undersides and puce detailing, the shaped rims edged in deep purple tinged with brown.

The paste and glaze of these examples is of the early Red Anchor Period. These very rare models decorated with shadowed insects and butterflies, a type of decoration at Chelsea that reached its perfected style in the Raised Anchor Period. The style, pioneered at Meissen by the painter Johann Gottried Klinger , depict the shadowed insects in an altogether three dimensional aspect as they climb and fly above water leaves, that suggest the vessels might also be water cups.

In the 1755 sale, they are referred to as Water Cups and Finger Bowls thus furthering the trompe l’oeil aspect of a dinner or dessert table laid with porcelain depicting flowers and plants, which was the height of fashion during the Red Anchor Period of Manufacture. See Dr F. Severne Mackenna, ‘Chelsea Porcelain the Red Anchor Wares.’, for a slightly later example painted with small birds from Mr M.G.Kaufman’s collection, pl. 25, 52.

A celebrated similar pair to these examples, painted with leaves and shadowed insects, of this early date sold by Brian Haughton Gallery in 2010, see ‘Nature’s Triumph Botanical Themes on Porcelain.’, p. 36 and 37, nos, 26 and 27. Finger bowls are seldom found in English porcelain with rare surviving examples found at Worcester during the First Period of Manufacture under Dr Wall.

Provenance: Private collection