Vintage Wedgwood Hand-Painted Bone China Coffee Can Demitasse Pair – Regency Acanthus, Cosmos & Forget-Me-Nots, WH1047C, England 1960s

A matched pair of Wedgwood hand-painted bone china demitasse cups and saucers, pattern WH 1047 C — the firm's hand-painted WH series, where each piece was painted by a Wedgwood artist rather than transfer-printed, and signed off with the Wedgwood Hand-painted pattern code. The form is the classic Regency coffee can: two straight-sided cylindrical cups with simple looped handles, each on its own scalloped saucer. The decoration runs the Regency vocabulary the firm reproduced through the mid-twentieth century — broad bright-green acanthus leaves wrapping the cup body, scattered with deep-pink four-petal cosmos blossoms, periwinkle-blue forget-me-not stars, and fine black squiggled stems threading the white ground between them. The rim and handle carry a 22K gilt line.

The hand-painted character is visible in the small differences between the two cups — the brushstrokes are not identical, the leaf veins fall a little differently, and the painted shadow on each cosmos blossom catches the light at a slightly different angle. That is the signature of true hand-painting, and the reason Wedgwood maintained the WH-series alongside their much larger transfer-print output for decades.

Wedgwood is best known for jasperware and creamware, but the firm's bone china hand-painted line — running through the 1930s–70s — is a quiet specialty within Wedgwood collecting. The WH-prefix patterns were never high-volume; small runs of hand-painted pieces from individual painters at the works, identified by pattern code rather than series name. The Portland-vase stamp + MADE IN ENGLAND + hand-inked WH 1047 C on the base confirms maker, line, and pattern in one mark.

The coffee can — a straight cylindrical cup made for after-dinner coffee — is the cup shape Regency drawing rooms used in the 1810s–30s, and the form English china makers reproduced through the mid-twentieth century when the Regency revival came back. Hand-painted Wedgwood demitasse pairs in this exact register are notably harder to find than the maker's transfer-printed or jasperware production.

A pair for the Wedgwood collector chasing the bone-china hand-painted niche, for the demitasse / espresso-cup collector, for the Regency or Georgian-revival dining room, for the host who serves after-dinner coffee in real porcelain, or as a wedding / anniversary / hostess gift.