Vintage George Jones Crescent Coffee Can and Saucer – Midsummer Floral, Hand Tinted Bouquets, Gilt Scroll Handle, Bone China England 1930s

The crescent stamped under this cup belongs to a name that auction houses know well — and usually for something else entirely. George Jones sold china before he ever made it: a Stoke merchant of some standing by 1850, he didn't open his own works until 1862, and by 1866 was firing the majolica that made him famous. Fine examples of it now cross the block at five figures. His bone china, made in the same works by the same hands, has spent a century in that shadow — which is why a cup like this still costs what it does.

Midsummer is a well-named pattern: not one flower but the whole June garden at once — a full pink rose at the centre of each hand-tinted bouquet, with poppies, narcissus and blue florets scattered around it, over a printed ground of small cornflower sprigs like stars thrown across the white. Look closely at the rose and you can see where the brush went twice: the shading is laid by hand over the print, the way the good English houses finished their better ware.

The form is a coffee can rather than an ordinary demitasse — straight-sided, flat-based, the shape that came in with strong coffee in the late 1700s and returned in the Deco years — with a gilt S-scroll handle and fine gold at rim, edge and foot.

The mark reads Bone China, Crescent, George Jones & Sons, Made in England, "Midsummer". The "& Sons" dates it after 1873, "Made in England" after about 1910, and the printed pattern name to the 1920s–30s. Both cup and saucer carry the same painter's number, R1045 F, in the same hand — an original pair, not a married one. The works closed in 1951.

For the coffee-can collector, the George Jones completist, or anyone who takes espresso in something ninety years old.