Antique Coalport Pink & Gold Jewelled Cabinet Cup Saucer – Raised Beads, Burnished Gilt Fern, Swirl Flute, Exhibition Grade, c. 1920s

Run a fingertip across the white panels of this Coalport cup and hundreds of tiny raised gold beads stand proud of the surface, placed one by one by hand. This is Coalport's celebrated jewelling — the technique that took the highest award for ceramics at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 — and no factory produces it today. The cup alternates rose-pink panels with jewelled white ones down a spiralling swirl flute; burnished gold ferns are painted onto the pink in liquid gold and polished stroke by stroke with an agate tool, and raised gold leaves in high relief divide the panels, thick enough to feel.

The saucer mirrors the cup exactly, so that seated together the spirals read as one continuous composition. Five separate hand-applied operations share the pair — the rose-pink ground, laid by hand and the most difficult of Coalport's ground colours; the jewelled dots; the burnished fern; the relief leaves; the gilt scalloped edges — each needing its own firing, where surviving jewelled Coalport usually carries one or two. The base bears the green printed Coalport crown mark with A.D. 1750, Bone China and Made in England, the pattern number hand-written in gold; that form of the mark belongs to the decades around the nineteen-twenties and after.

Jewelled porcelain was exhibition work, made to show what a factory could do rather than to fill table services, and it was never plentiful. The craft died with its makers; what survives of Coalport's jewelled work is all there will ever be.