A COLLECTOR’S PRIZED TROPHY
Since their introduction in the mid 1760s, six- sided hexagon jars have been the most coveted ware of the Worcester porcelain manufactory. Prices reached a crescendo at the turn of the century, when in 1897 a pair reputedly sold for £10,000. By the 1910s interest had waned. Following a 1913 valuation, the financially distressed Philip Yorke II of Erddig, Denbighshire, stuck a paper label on the bases of his rare pair of powdered blue ground hexagon jars: ‘worth about £850’.
There are three hexagon jars at Fenton House, Hampstead, with collections formed by Mrs W S (Millicent) Salting and her daughter Katherine, Lady Binning, who acquired the property in 1936. The factory, founded in Worcester in 1751 by a consortium including a physician, Dr John Wall, and an apothecary, William Davis, used an artificial porcelain with soapstone capable of withstanding boiling water. The shape of these jars derives from 17th- century Japanese forms. Worcester produced them in various sizes and patterns, sold as pairs and garnitures. The Fenton jars are decorated with Worcester’s archetypal and innovative ground colour, described as ‘scaleblue’. The ground was painted with dense overlapping fish scales followed by a wash of cobalt, resulting in a mottled, mosaic-like pattern, with shaped reserves masked out and later painted in polychrome.
The largest of the Fenton jars has two reserves painted in colourful enamels and gold with exotically dressed Watteauesque chinoiserie seated figures of a man playing a lyre and a woman with a nosegay in fantasy gardens above rococo scrollwork in puce. Similar depictions of musicians appear on Worcester scale-blue teawares made in about 1765– 8. They copy Chelsea patterns decorated with chinoiserie musicians, made around 1759– 65. These were based on a series of engravings after Jean-Antoine Watteau entitled Diverses figures Chinoises et Tartares peintes par
Watteau, published in Paris in 1731. The engravings were based on a suite of painted wall panels for a Chinese cabinet in the chateau de la Muette, Paris, painted by Watteau in 1708–15.
The Fenton jar was listed in a 1914 catalogue of Mrs Salting’s collection, then displayed at number 49, Berkeley Square, prepared by the St James’s dealer George Henry Stoner, of Stoner & Evans. It was then attributed to the Scottish painter John Donaldson, based on a painter’s monogram ‘JD’ on a Worcester vase in the Lady Ludlow collection, now in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle.
The smaller scale-blue hexagon jars, decorated with exotic birds in a ‘Japan pattern’, and made in about 1768– 70, was acquired by Mrs Salting some time after 1914.