Antique Royal Worcester Parrot Miniature Coffee Pot And Teapot Pair – Hand Coloured Bird, Circa 1760 Design, Original Lids, Registered 1913

A pair of Royal Worcester miniature pots in the Old Worcester Parrot pattern, a coffee pot of about five inches and a teapot of about three and a half. The coffee pot has the pear-shaped body, long curved spout and high C-handle of its full-sized counterpart; the teapot is round-bellied with a short spout and loop handle. Both keep their original lids, each finial tipped in gold.

A russet parrot perches among flowering branches on the face of each pot, ringed with rose, green, yellow and blue, and a band of the same flowers runs round each shoulder and lid. The outlines were printed and the colour filled in by hand, which shows where an enamel runs a little past its line or a petal is laid heavier at one edge — no two pots are quite alike, though the drawing beneath them is.

Small pots are the difficult ones to make. Spout, handle and finial were each moulded separately and joined by hand to a body barely wider than an egg, and all of them warp or part in the firing more readily than the same forms at full size. The red line over spout and handle was drawn freehand, widening and narrowing as the shape turns.

The design was registered in 1913. British registered design numbers ran consecutively year by year, and Rd No 623916, on the base of both pots, falls inside the 1913 block. Registration fixes the earliest date rather than the latest, since a pattern once registered could run for years, so the pots themselves date from 1913 or afterwards.

Royal Worcester, copying itself. The black lettering reads Old Worcester Parrot · Circa 1760 A.D., unusually candid for a factory: it admits the piece is a reproduction and names what it reproduces. The original belongs to Worcester's first period, when English porcelain was still working out its idea of Chinese export ware. The copy is now an antique itself, and miniatures are usually met singly rather than in matched pairs.