Vintage Royal Doulton Glamis Thistle Teacup & Saucer – Signed Curnock, Hand Coloured Bloom, Green Band, Gold Trim, Bone China, England 1938

A Royal Doulton bone-china teacup and saucer in Glamis Thistle — a green rim band running around the lip of both pieces, purple-blue thistle heads gathered with their spiny green leaves, and a gilt rim and foot. The saucer is signed at the centre by the painter, P. Curnock, in a fine sepia script near the well.

That signature is the heart of this set. Glamis Thistle was Royal Doulton's first artist-signed bone-china pattern, and Percy Curnock — the firm's senior flower painter at Burslem — is the man who drew it, after the thistle he saw growing near Glamis Castle in 1938. So this is not a generic signed piece: the hand on the saucer belongs to the artist who originated the pattern. Look at the thistle head and you can read the handwork — the flower is a puff of fine purple filaments rising from a green calyx, each filament drawn as a separate stroke and shaded deeper at the core, paler at the fringe; the leaves below carry individual spines, set at slightly different angles leaf to leaf. The composition on the saucer is arranged differently from the cup rather than mirrored — the small tell that a painter finished each piece by hand rather than a transfer doing both identically.

The pattern carries its provenance printed into the glaze. The saucer mark reads Glamis Thistle — Found Near Glamis Castle, Home of Queen Elizabeth — Glamis being the childhood home of Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the birthplace of Princess Margaret. The thistle itself is Scotland's national flower, an emblem of resilience, which gives the set a second life as a Scottish-heritage piece: a St. Andrew's Day or Burns Night table, a Clan-family gift, a quiet flower-of-the-nation shelf piece.

The base carries the green Royal Doulton lion-and-crown roundel, Made in England / Bone China, with R.1938 and the pattern code H4601. Produced from the late 1930s, this earlier green-mark example with the artist's own signature sits at the start of the pattern's long run.

A cup-and-saucer for the Royal Doulton and Glamis Thistle collector, for the artist-signed bone-china cabinet, for the Scottish-heritage or Queen Mother enthusiast, or as a milestone gift to a family with Scottish roots.