Vintage Masons Patent Ironstone Silver Jubilee Preserve Pot – Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip Silhouette Cameos, Lidded, England 1977

A lidded preserve pot in Mason's Patent Ironstone, made for the Silver Jubilee of 1977, printed in a deep claret with the crowned cypher E II R and 1952-1977 on the front. English roses, Scottish thistles, Irish shamrock and Welsh daffodils are painted in colour around it, and the lid carries the dedication right around its edge — To Commemorate the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II 1952-1977 — beneath a small flower-bud knop, modelled and painted by hand, no two quite alike.

Most jubilee ware of 1977 shows the Queen alone. This pot gives her one face and H.R.H. Prince Philip the other, each as a white silhouette on a claret ground. Before photography a cut profile was the portrait ordinary households could afford, so the form belongs to much the same century as the body it is printed on.

Ironstone was patented by Charles James Mason in 1813, and unusually for English ceramics it was a patent on a clay recipe rather than on a pattern: a dense, hard, inexpensive ware that could carry heavy colour, meant to sit between costly bone china and ordinary earthenware. The name was pure salesmanship — there is no iron in it — and it worked so well that the word became generic, with half the Staffordshire potteries selling ironstone or stone china by the middle of the century. The shape here belongs to the kitchen rather than the cabinet: a straight-sided pot on a low foot, sized for preserves, with a stepped rim cut to take the lid.

The lid is the one that came with it and seats cleanly on the rim; on pots of this kind the lid is usually the first thing to go. The mark under the foot still reads Mason's Patent Ironstone, a hundred and sixty-four years after the patent, on a pot made to mark twenty-five years of a reign.