Getting a handle on cups
0 Comments | Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph, Jul 23, 2010 | by Craig Bewick
Here’s our starter for 10: Let’s take a look at the four tea cups in the sale tomorrow, commencing in Brigg at 9.30am, and see if we can work out what’s missing? If your first thought was that the tea cups do not have any handles, then you are spot on. If the first thing that struck you was they did not have any saucers, then you are also correct.
We can dispose of the saucer point quickly. They would originally have had saucers – quite unusual things to the modern eye in that they would have lacked rims – but those have been lost over the past couple of hundred years.
The lack of handles, though, is quite curious, is it not? Why would you have a tea cup without a handle? The answer – as the customers of many upmarket ethnic restaurants will know – is that the Chinese fashion is to drink tea out of bowls, rather than cups. When English potters began producing their version of Chinese porcelain in the late 18th century, they also copied this design.
The handle that turns a tea bowl into a tea cup is a European fashion.
The four pieces date back to the late 18th or early 19th centuries and were made by the famous New Hall pottery in Staffordshire. They are not a set but have various dates ranging from the 1790s though to 1815.
They are to go under the hammer in tomorrow’s Antiques, Furniture and Collectibles Auction at the Brigg rooms
restaurant point of sale
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