Antique Royal Worcester Highland Cattle Coffee Cup Saucer – Signed H Stinton, Fully Gilded Interior, Hand Painted Scottish Scene, Dated 1918

A Royal Worcester coffee cup and saucer in bone china, hand painted with Highland cattle and signed by the artist. It is coffee size rather than tea size, the bowl small and deep with a gilded ring handle, the interior gold from rim to base with no white showing. The saucer has a gilded centre well, and around it the same cattle stand on moorland.

The painting is the whole of it. Two long-haired cattle stand in the foreground against hills that dissolve into mist, and the coats are built up hair by hair — ochre over brown over black, each stroke laid separately rather than blended, which separates this work from imitations that look right until you come close. The distances are carried in violet and grey, so the eye reads depth on a surface barely two inches across.

Everything else is gold. The interior was gilded as a single continuous field and then burnished, an operation that required its own firing and could never survive a metal spoon, so a cup finished this way left the factory as something to be looked at. The handle is gilded over its whole length, and a gold line runs round the saucer rim.

It was made in 1918, and the factory says so itself. Royal Worcester added a dot beside its mark for every year from 1892, and by 1915 there were twenty-four of them; in 1916 the count was restarted with a star, one dot added annually thereafter. Both pieces carry the puce crowned mark with a star and two dots, which is 1918 exactly.

Harry Stinton, who signed it at the lower right. He joined Worcester in 1896 at thirteen and learned Highland cattle from his father John, shifting his palette toward purples and autumn tints to tell the two apart — the register you see here. Most antique china arrives anonymous; a signed piece traces to one hand and one year, which is a different market. Coffee sizes are scarcer than tea, and 1918 was a thin war year.