Vintage Old Royal Bone China Fruit Teacup Saucer – Hand Sponged Peach Ground, Pear Grapes Plums Cherries, Gilt Handle, Sampson Smith 1950s

The peach ground on this bone china teacup and saucer has been laid inside the bowl and across the saucer, leaving the outside plain white, so the colour arrives as the cup is lifted. Fruit sits at the centre of each.

Old Royal was the trade name of Sampson Smith of Longton, and the firm behind it spent most of its life doing something quite different. Sampson Smith opened in 1846 and became, in Jewitt's phrase, one of the largest producers of Staffordshire earthenware figures and dogs — the flatback spaniels that stood on Victorian mantelpieces. Bone china teaware came late, the Old Royal name adopted around 1930. Barker Bros bought the company in 1939, and from 1941 the wartime concentration scheme moved production into the Barker Street works, so the china of these years was made under another firm's roof. Alfred Clough took the group over in 1959 and closed Sampson Smith in 1963, not for want of trade but to give the earthenware factory next door room to expand.

The mark places this pair in those last years. Est. 1846 and the script S are printed in green above Old Royal Bone China in dark red, the two-colour form used from 1945 onwards, with a painter's tally beneath. The fruit itself is a printed lithograph, and at close range the screen carrying it shows across pear and grapes. The peach was applied by hand, sponged on in mottled patches that thin at the rim and gather toward the centre, so no two cups are quite alike; the gilding follows, brushed along the rim, the foot ring, the handle edges and the saucer rim.

Sampson Smith made china for barely thirty of its hundred and seventeen years, and the name still belongs mostly to the dogs. The colour on the inside was the whole idea: a plain white cup on the table, and a peach one the moment it is raised.