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The story of British aristocracy’s love affair with Chinese Armorial Porcelain which transformed life in manor houses two centuries ago lies at the heart of a sale of Chinese Armorial wares at Bonhams on June 20th at New Bond Street.

Today one pops down to the local departmental store to buy a dinner service - a rather different process from the two year saga that took ships halfway round the world in the18th and 19th centuries to bring back new 300 piece services. This was a journey which left the ocean floors thinly spread with Chinese porcelain - while impatient would-be owners of fine dinner services waited back in England.

Aristocrats and wealthy merchants commissioning porcelain from China often requested that it be emblazoned with the family’s arms. The Coats Collection is a remarkable survey of the range of private people who followed this splendidly decorative opportunity of family branding and status.

This sale of the unique Coats Collection, created by an American couple with a love of Chinese porcelain is estimated to sell for over £500,000. Exotic Chinese armorial porcelain enriched generations of mahogany-panelled English-taste country-house interiors for over three centuries, and still connects people across the world – the Coats Collection is the proof.

‘Chinese Armorial’ porcelain – that is, Chinese porcelain specially commissioned by a Western patron to be painted in China with his personal coat-of-arms – formed an extremely small, but artistically significant element of China Trade shipping cargoes.

This stunning porcelain represented a social revolution in England, affecting the way people ate, entertained and even the way they designed their homes including separate dining rooms – no longer eating in great halls - allowing this lavish crockery to be shown off to best effect.

This specially commissioned crested porcelain was shipped to Europe from China’s main port Canton, from about 1720 to 1830 by the famous English East India Company.

British supremacy at sea coincided with booming economic success in England, as agricultural and industrial innovations spawned unimagined wealth at many levels of society, which was often recycled rapidly into creature comforts and conspicuous consumption. Few things were more conspicuous for a newly married, newly rich businessman than a 300-piece dinner service boldly enamelled with the conjoined family arms of the owner and his spouse!

Aristocratic families across Europe were buyers but nothing compared with the British market. Today we can identify some 4,000 different insignia, initials and coats-of-arms on Chinese Export commissioned for UK clients; yet another 2,000 remain to be identified, and even in 2005 scholars were still finding one or two unrecorded ones a week.

A new way of entertaining

This new, confident society in ‘Augustan’ (early 18th century) England represented an opportunity for considerable change in the way individuals entertained. After the political and social disruption of the mid/late 17th century, English society appreciated the opportunity again to build fine houses; to fill them with modish accessories, in decorative schemes popularised by designers like the émigré French Huguenot Daniel Marot; and generally to upgrade the quality of ‘polite’ behaviour, in ranks of society way below Court and aristocratic grandee level. There are allusions everywhere in the histories and diaries of the period. Porcelain itself becomes popular, a novel substitute for cut flowers during winter months; offering innovatory design possibilities for emancipated ‘ladies of the house’ to dress their Withdrawing rooms and leaven a rich, dark baroque interior.

New exotic imports revolutionised cuisine, including spices from Java, from the Moluccas, from India; while market gardens around London, and a vague new awareness that fruit and vegetables were actually good nutrition, saw fruit compotes and salads served more often as the 18th century progressed. These new, more imaginative fuller-flavoured cuisines, requiring new vessels in which to serve them, were paralleled by the invention of delicacies served in specially designed silver and porcelain small vessels – sorbets, jellies, and custards. And above all, three new imports transformed the way hosts (and particularly hostesses) treated their guests. From the late 17th century, three caffeine-rich but alcohol-free imports came to require massive quantities of porcelain serving vessels, as a very wide spectrum of Western society felt confident to offer and serve chocolate, coffee and tea.

LECTURE ON CHINESE ARMORIAL PORCELAIN

Colin Sheaf, Head of Asian Art and Deputy Chairman of Bonhams, will outline the way in which Chinese Armorial porcelain affected many aspects of European social entertaining in the 18th and 19th Centuries in a lecture at 11.30am Sunday June 18th at Bonhams 101 New Bond Street.

Free admission by ticket available from: Christine Mitchell +44 (0) 207 468 8248 chris.Mitchell@bonhams.com

For more details visit the Bonhams web site.