Let us suppose that you love the old porcelains and chinas of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and you want to get together, as inexpensively as possible, specimens of every kind. You want to be able, whenever you please, to see, feel and compare pieces from Caughley and Coalport, Worcester and Derby, China and Dresden, Mintons and Rockingham. In other words, hard up as you are you want to become a connoisseur of old china.

Surprising though it may seem, there’s a way of doing it, and it will cost you shillings rather than pounds.

Tucked away in cabinets of antique shops you will usually find some odd cups. Now, this may not seem at first glance a very attractive subject for collecting, but here is where the true collector’s imagination makes all the difference. The normal frequenter of antique shops looks into the cupboard and sees only a few odd cups:

“A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him; And it was nothing more.”

He (or more likely she !) passes on to something more obvious—and more expensive.

Antique Collector MagazineBut picture to yourself rows of those little cups, of all shapes and sizes, of many different types of decoration— hand painting, transfer printing, with figures, flowers or landscapes. Imagine, too, a way of arranging them so that they don’t look at all like odd pieces which have strayed away from their sets, but which themselves make up a pattern.

So before you start buying any cups, hunt around in old furniture shops and warehouses for one of those flat glass wall cabinets sometimes seen in sweet and tobacconist’s shops. They’re about a couple of feet square, and the shelves no more than three inches wide. You may have to put in another shelf or two, for as your quarry are usually below three inches in height you need shelf space rather than headroom. But it will be better if the shelves are of glass so you can see all around your specimens. If there is an electrician in the house, who can put in some concealed lighting, so much the better.

Now you are ready to start looking in those cupboards in the antique shops. But don’t at first be in too much of a hurry to buy. Sometimes the dealer knows he has a rarity, and is keeping it in the hope that a saucer of the same pattern will turn up. This is not very likely, for in the days when many of these cups were made, a set consisted of one lot of saucers for both tea-cups and coffee-cups. Moreover, people have for years been buying pretty saucers to use as ash and pin trays.

So you start buying cautiously, at sums like five shillings, ten shillings, fifteen shillings. If you know nothing at all about old porcelain or early bone china, all the better. Whenever a cup takes your fancy, you buy it, never mind what it is supposed to be. Whatever it is, you won’t have risked much and you will have given yourself some pleasure. And it may well turn out to be a rarity. When you get it home, and put it among the other ones in the cabinet, it is then that you’ll be able to sort and compare them, not only with each other, but with those shown in books on the subject.

For a few pounds, and a little quiet study in your own home, you can become as well able to distinguish the different styles, and bodies, and forms of decoration, as the wealthiest sort of collector.

But I think the greatest joy you will get is to see the way such unconsidered things gain from being together, and how beautifully they blend. Our picture is from a collection of coffee cups in the Harris Museum, Preston, and although they are all “Worcester” of different periods, there is variety both in shape and decoration. The first two in the top row are not really cups at all but “cans,” or “breakfast cans,” the name given to those which have no foot-rim and where the shape is more or less cylindrical. Both were made in the Flight and Barr period, at the end of the eighteenth century. Next we have one of the typical rust-red Worcester Japans, following the Imari pattern, and made about 177o. The lower three, are fine examples of the Dr. Wall period transfer printing, the first in black and the second two in brown.

You must not be too disappointed if pieces as distinguished as these do not turn up very often, or are highly priced when they do. I have seen 25s. asked for a Caughley cup, but I bought a Dr. Wall blue and white cup for 5s. only last year. In any case there is just as much fun in getting together all the later specimens from Derby, Coalport, Worcester, Mintons, and other nineteenth-century wares.

But tea cups show a much wider range in shape and pattern. There are the small handleless tea bowls of the eighteenth century, carried over into the nineteenth by some factories like New Hall; there are the Swansea ones with tiny heads in the handles, obviously inspired by Continental models, the Worcester birds in panels on scale blue. All down the Victorian age too, all these early designs were followed, adapted re-arranged by potters both here and on the Continent, so there are plenty to choose from.

Many of them won’t be marked, for that was usually reserved for the plates or large pieces. But that makes it all the more fun : and what is more important, as you get to know the styles and qualities of the paste, etc., you will be several jumps ahead of most dealers and they will be only too pleased to get rid of them.

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