English Teapots

Words Dolores O’Donoghue

The renovated British Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York display an array of beautiful and intriguing masterworks created between 1500 and 1900. The suite of ten galleries provides a fresh perspective on British sculpture, design and decorative arts of the period. 

During the 17th and 18th centuries, as the Empire expanded, there was a hunger for overseas exploration, which promised both profit and adventure. London was the hub for global shipping and trade, with high-value merchandise arriving from all over the world. The goods brought from China, India and the West Indies included tea, sugar, coffee and chocolate, as well as porcelain, cotton, mahogany and ivory.

A gallery devoted to ‘Tea, Trade, and Empire’ explores the period’s visual exuberance, with 100 English teapots displayed in a pair of ten-foot-tall semicircular cases. Presiding over this display is the small but powerful figure of a merchant from 1719, modelled in China by the Cantonese artist Amoy Chinqua (active after 1716). Jaunty, prosperous and proud, the East India Company entrepreneur who posed for this portrait represents the commercial interests that drove the expansion of the Empire.

Tea was first imported to Europe from China by the Portuguese and Dutch in the early 1600s. By the early 1700s, it was imported by the British East India Company directly from China. However, it was Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese princess who married Charles II of England in 1662, that established tea as a fashionable beverage at court and amongst the aristocracy. As tea became a popular social beverage, a strong secondary market for ceramic goods developed as it became necessary to acquire appropriate tableware to serve it in style. 

While the English adopted their own tea-drinking habits, such as adding sugar and milk, they liked to drink from imported Chinese porcelain teacups and teapots. The influence of these early Chinese imports was absorbed and imitated when Europeans eventually began to manufacture their own porcelain ware. When tea drinking became affordable and popular with all classes of society, teapots and accessories became available in less expensive clays like stoneware and earthenware.

Porcelain teapots were a staple of British upper- and middle-class households in the 18th and 19th centuries. This exhibition demonstrates the importance they held as objects indicating the family’s wealth and standing in society. The display also embodies a history that can be read from multiple perspectives: a beautiful English teapot speaks of both the prosperous commercial economy and the exploitation of human and natural resources that accompanied the tea trade.  

Style of Ralph Wood the Younger, late 18th century (featured image)

Lead-glazed earthenware. In the form of an elephant and castle, this teapot was partly intended as a political skit on the British rule of India and the problem of corruption in the British East India Company.

Staffordshire, c.1740. 

Salt-glazed stoneware. This teapot, with its interesting lion’s-paw feet, is an example of English drabware, a type of Staffordshire salt-glazed stoneware introduced in the 1720s.

Style of Whieldon type, Mid-18th century 

Glazed agateware. A finely press-moulded marbleised manganese clay body with a clear lead glaze. This technique is especially associated with master potter, Thomas Whieldon (1719–1795). The teapot is modelled in the form of a scallop (or pecten) shell, with a biting snake handle and bird’s head spout and recumbent lion finial. 

Staffordshire, c.1755 

Salt-glazed stoneware with enamel decoration. Slip-cast in a canister shape depicting a Georgian house on three floors, with the British Royal Arms above the central door. The bird’s head spout is gripped by a hand and flanked by masks.

Staffordshire, c.1760–65 

Salt-glazed stoneware. The Age of Enlightenment brought about a curiosity for the study of natural history. This explains why potters created these English teapots in imitation of crinoidal limestone, formed in the Carboniferous period around three hundred million years ago. It is decorated with a random arrangement of teeth, eyes and jaws.

Paul de Lamerie, 1744/45

Silver sugar box. Decorated with what appear to be whimsical scenes with palm trees and thatched huts; but there is also an enslaved man toiling on his knees to produce the sugar that made Britain rich. The scenes are surrounded by abstract organic ornamentation that suggests a grotesque face, a juxtaposition that is characteristic of Paul de Lamerie’s workshop.

Staffordshire, c.1740

Salt-glazed stoneware. Diamond shape press-moulded with intaglio pecten shells and lizard finial, all decorated with royal blue birds and foliage.

Figure of a European Merchant, 1719 

Polychrome unfired clay and wood. By Amoy Chinqua (Chinese, Canton). This is not a generic portrait of a European but rather a detailed likeness of a foreign merchant working in China, observed first-hand, and is notable for the very high quality of the modelling of the face and wig and detailed costume. Height of figure only 29.4 cm.

Set of teaspoons, sugar tongs and mote spoon, early 18th century

Metalwork: gold and platinum. All bearing the harp crowned marking of the Dublin assay office, and ‘K’ surmounted by an earl’s coronet (possibly for Earl of Kerry). The teaspoons are inscribed with ‘LA’ crowned (maker’s mark for John Ladyman) and ‘q’ (date letter for 1711–12). The pierced spoon, c.1730–35, used to skim stray tea leaves from the cup, has an ‘FW’ in a rectangle (possibly maker’s mark for Francis Williamson). The sugar tongs c.1730–50 do not have a clear maker’s mark.

David King, 1723–24.

Silver, wood. David King, after whom King Street, Dublin, was named, was one of the leading silversmiths of the early 18th century. This teapot bears the harp crowned marking of the Dublin assay office and ‘D K’ crowned in an oval (maker’s mark for David King) on the bottom and on the inside lid.

• ‘English Teapots’ is published in Anthology Volume 17. Read more features from this volume or buy it now.
• Browse more features in exhibitions.
• If you enjoyed this feature, we’d love it if you would share it!