20% OFF beautiful tablecloths at Faro Home
Faro Home
With the prospect of spending summer evenings socialising with friends back on the cards, we can’t wait to host a dinner party. And laying the table with a beautiful tablecloth, antique china and ! ickering tea lights is the perfect way to mark the occasion. So we’re thrilled to be teaming up with Faro Home to o"er H&A readers 20 per cent o" its collection of beautiful block-printed tablecloths.
Founded by sisters Farheen and Ozma, Faro Home sources directly from artisans in India, who use the traditional techniques of weaving, block-printing and embroidery to cra # their textiles. Sourcing pieces in this way not only brings unique pieces to Britain at a "ordable prices but also helps to support local Indian communities.
For a bohemian feel, why not opt for the elegantly !oral Bahaar Dove tablecloth (pictured)? Or embrace the sunshine with the vivid Florence Coral tablecloth and the geometric turquoise Vert de Mer (all from £65). farohome.com
Founded in 1744 by enterprising Walloon Hugenot immigrant Nicholas Sprimont, Chelsea was the first (though not the only) well-organised porcelain factory to survive long enough to leave a lasting impression. Huguenots arriving in England to escape war and persecution brought with them skills such as weaving, lace-making and silversmithing that would prove fundamental to the British Industrial Revolution. Although a talented silversmith, Sprimont looked around this rather crowded landscape and realised he would have to do something novel if he wanted to stand out. Having learned about porcelain in France, he applied his design skills to this new and, at least in England, unexplored medium, and so the Chelsea factory began.
London in those days was a smelly, busy place and, as today, there were wealthy and not so wealthy areas: the fashionable and a"uent West End stood directly opposite the gri#y, industrial East End. Anyone with money moved west, away from the fumes and the noise in the east. And the dreamy li#le village of Chelsea, perched on the banks of the river Thames, was particularly popular. Beautiful houses were being built, a#racting the best artisans and artists of the day (JMW Turner lived in a co#age by the river) and if you wanted to serve royals and well-heeled Londoners, Chelsea was the place to be.
Sprimont not only had a brilliant talent for design, he also knew how to ful ! l the wishes of an exclusive clientele. Coming from mainland Europe, he had an intimate knowledge of high-quality silver design, which he skilfully translated into purely British ‘so$-paste’ porcelain. The earliest European porcelain, made at Meissen, had a hard, glassy quality, which was known as hard-paste porcelain (considered the truest form of porcelain), but makers in Saint- Cloud, in France, soon started making a so$er version that was easier to work with and !red at a slightly lower temperature. This ‘so$-paste’ porcelain became the standard in Britain, and Sprimont chose to work with it.
Looking at his early wares, you will see beautiful, vulnerable-seeming shapes, sometimes slightly tentative, always graceful. They remind you of silver objects, but also of early French Saint- Cloud porcelain. Meanwhile, decoration was sparing, inspired by Meissen, and consisting of !nely painted %owers, bugs and bu#er%ies, or Japanese-style ‘Kakiemon’ prunus branches and rather adorable tigers. In the mid 1750s, Sprimont went through a bout of illness which paused production for two years; by the time he returned to work, everything had changed. War in Germany meant that Meissen porcelain imports had stopped and fashion had switched to richly decorated Sèvres porcelain from
France. When Sprimont failed to convince the British government to block imports of Sèvres, he decided to outdo the competition. In this later period, Chelsea produced lavish designs in the French style: con!dent shapes, bright ground colours with rich gilding and exuberant birds. Despite producing products that were, in essence, imitations of European designs, Chelsea’s wares – displaying Sprimont’s unique imagination – created a highly original British taste for porcelain.
Eventually, Sprimont’s health failed and without him as the driving force the factory could not survive. By 1770 it was in the hands of William Duesbury in Derby. Duesbury knew he had bought a gem, so he ran it in tandem with the Derby factory for 14 years. It is hard to distinguish the pieces of this time, known as the ‘Chelsea-Derby’ period, as many of them went through the hands of workers in both locations. By the time it closed in 1784, the Chelsea factory was making everything a wealthy person needed: dinner sets, tea services, vases, pot pourris and !gures. However, as it was all produced by hand, output was low. If Chelsea was exclusive and expensive in its time, it’s even rarer today, so we can expect to pay a premium to own a piece.
Chelsea produced some of the most celebrated porcelain ever made and we owe much to the artistic genius of Sprimont: his gracious, silverwork-inspired shapes helped to determine what would become typically British porcelain designs, and his imaginative use of French and German styles cemented the artistic freedom that would become a hallmark of British porcelain.
Yet this doesn’t mean Chelsea was the only in%uential factory in town… but more about that next time!
Among the early pioneers of porcelain, Nicholas Sprimont understood the need to stand out,