Antique Cauldon Apple Green Cabinet Teacup Saucer – Fully Gilded Interior, Acid Etched Gold, Painted Reserves, Rope Handle, Edwardian 1910s

The inside of this Cauldon cup is gold from rim to base, and the handle is a rope of gold; outside, an apple-green ground carries a gilt lace of arcading and leaf-tips, with hand-painted bouquets set in white reserves and a pedestal foot picked out in gold ovals. The pattern itself is on record: the surviving Ridgway pattern books list it as V/4441 — "as V/3926 only Vienneze Green grd.", the Viennese-green rendering of a Mazarin-blue design — and the archive's photographed example matches this cup in its green, its lace, its reserves, its rope handle and its foot. Where the two part company is the interior: the recorded cup keeps a white ground with gold scrollwork, while this one is gilded solid — a richer state of the pattern than the archive itself shows, and one of which no other example has been traced.

The marks give the window. Both pieces carry the black printed Cauldon Ltd · England, a form used for sixteen years only — from the firm's incorporation in 1904 to its receivership in 1920 — and a decorator's tally sits in red beneath the cup. Three gildings share the surfaces: the rim and border bands acid-etched, so matt pattern and burnished ground alternate within one layer of gold and the design comes and goes as the piece turns; the arcading painted freehand over the green; the bowl and the saucer's well laid flat and burnished. The bouquets — a rose, a cornflower, a scatter of forget-me-nots — were painted one reserve at a time, the colour kept inside the drawn line.

Cauldon Place was one of the grand addresses of Staffordshire potting: John Ridgway of this house was Potter to Queen Victoria and took a first prize at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the works later supplied the Czar of Russia in competition with Sèvres and Dresden. Cabinet cups of this order were made in ones and twos, to be looked at rather than used; Cauldon bone china ended in 1958, and the supply is closed.