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 twisted rope of gold. Outside, an apple-green ground carries gilt arcading, with hand-painted bouquets set into white reserves.

Three quite different gildings meet on the one cup, each catching light in its own way. The rim band is acid-etched: a scroll bitten into the glaze before the gold went on, so within one layer the sunken pattern reads matt against a burnished ground and the design appears and disappears as the cup turns. Below, the green carries painted gold — pointed arches springing from a row of leaf tips, each filled with a dotted lattice, drawn freehand at a scale that leaves no room for a wobble. The interior is a third thing again, laid flat and burnished smooth, with no pattern at all. The pedestal foot is white with gold ovals and dots, and the saucer repeats all three registers: a gilded well, the green band with its arches and reserves, then a wide etched border.

The bouquets in the white reserves had to be done one at a time. Each holds a rose, a cornflower and a scatter of forget-me-nots, built from a few loaded strokes rather than shaded slowly, the colour kept inside the drawn line. The rope handle is a cabled ring gilded solid, with a small thumb spur worked into the top, and a decorator's tally in red sits beneath the foot. The mark there, Cauldon Ltd, ran for sixteen years only, 1904 to 1920 — the same works that supplied the Czar of Russia against Sèvres and Dresden.

Cabinet cups were never made in the numbers tea services were. A cup gilded inside like this could not take a spoon, so it left the works to be looked at, in ones and twos rather than by the dozen, and three techniques on one piece is generous even here, where one is usual. Cauldon bone china ended in 1958, and nothing has carried the name since.