Antique Grainger Royal China Works Miniature Three Handled Tyg – Hand Painted Robins, Blush Ivory Ground, Worcester England, Dated 1901

A tyg — a drinking cup with more than one handle — made in miniature, an inch and a half tall. The full-sized version was passed round a table, each person taking a handle nobody else had touched; this one was only ever made to be looked at. The body is a plain cylinder on a moulded foot, three small handles at even thirds, two robins in flight across the front.

The ground is blush ivory, the tint the Worcester factories were known for: a wash of colour laid over the finished glaze and fired again, shading from almost white at the rim to warm apricot at the handles and foot. The whole difficulty is the join, and here there is not a line to be found anywhere in it.

The robins are enamel over the glaze, built up in thin layers, and the breast feathers are drawn stroke by stroke rather than blended — you can see the separate hairs of the brush at the throat. Each handle was luted on by hand to a body under an inch and a half wide, each carrying a gold dot and dash on its outer face. There is a gilt line at the rim and another at the foot.

1901, to the year. The green mark gives Royal China Works · G & Co · Established 1801 · Worcester · England, and beneath it a single letter K. Grainger ran its year letters straight through from A in 1891 to L in 1902, so K can only be 1901 — the Museum of Royal Worcester publishes the table. The letters stop at L because the factory did.

Grainger's, the other Worcester factory — founded 1801 by a man trained at Chamberlain's, and a rival across the same city for most of a century. Royal Worcester bought it in 1889 but let the name run until the works shut in 1902, which is why the lettered marks reach twelve years and no further. When the doors closed the painters crossed Worcester and joined Royal Worcester, the Stintons among them.