Description: English soft-paste porcelain, assembled teaset with 28 pieces, many of which are marked with a crescent for Worcester Porcelain, including a teapot and cover, sugar bowl and cover (added), cream pot, twelve teacups, and twelve saucers. The teapot is decorated with a blue transfer print in a variation of the "Fence" pattern of two flying birds over a chinoiserie landscape with trees, rocks, foliage, and a small temple-like building, a design adapted from Chinese porcelain of the early to mid 18th century, and marked with a blue crescent for Worcester. Excavations at Worcester indicate that Worcester used the fence pattern as early as 1765 until 1785, and perhaps as late as 1788. Excavations also show that underglaze blue designs became predominent around 1775, and that the Fence pattern was the most common of those. Separate copper plates were required for copying the same pattern on different forms, and because the pattern was so popular, numerous copper plates were exceucuted. In addition, many of the plates were reworked, all which accounts for the variations of the design on both the same and diverse forms. Several competitors copied the Fence design, including Caughley from 1775 to around 1790, Lowestoft from about 1770-1799, Derby from about 1765 to about 1772, and Coalport from 1799-1814; it was also copied on earthenwares. The cups and saucers are mainly marked with a blue crescent (also two X's and a "40") for Worcester and decorated with the "Prunus Root" pattern in blue, which was used on a wide range of shapes and over the period from about 1756 until the mid 1770s. This pattern was also produced at Bow, Lowestoft, Longton Hall, Derby, and Richard Chaffer's Liverpool factory. The cream pot (unmarked) is decorated in blue with the Mansfield pattern, which was used at Worcester, Bow, Lowestoft, Longton Hall, Derby, Plymouth, and Liverpool factories of Chaffers, Christian, and Pennington. The sugar bowl is also decorated with a blue transfer print with floral sprays and butterfields, and marked witha blue crescent.
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