Teabowl & saucer, Qianlong c.1750, with the arms of Burrell
The design of this finely painted teabowl and saucer copies exactly the bookplate of Peter Burrell of Beckenham (including diagonal lines on the shield indicating green) omitting only the lower part of the mantling on the bookplate and the motto.
Peter Burrell II of Kelsey Park near Beckenham in Kent (1692-1756) was a member of parliament, a sub-governor of the South Sea Company and a leading merchant in the Portugal trade. He married in 1723, Amy, daughter of the immensely wealthy Hugh Raymond of Saling House in Essex, and of Langley in Kent (purchased in 1732), a former East India Company captain between 1700-1710, and later a director of the EIC with considerable shipping interests. At his death in 1737 Raymond is recorded as Principal Managing Owner of fifty-four voyages. His nephew, Charles Raymond, was to become even more successful and the most influential of all East India ship owners in the 18th century. A number of armorial services were made for this and related families.
Peter and Amy Burrell (neé Raymond) had two sons: Peter, born in 1724, who married Elizabeth Lewis, ordering a service to commemorate this event in 1749; and William, born 1732, who married in 1773 his cousin Sophia Raymond. The teabowl and saucer were undoubtedly made for Peter Burrell, but whether father or son cannot be certain. However, the baroque style of the bookplate would undoubtedly indicate the former, while his son ordered a different armorial service at this time impaling the arms of Lewis for his marriage.
A very fine pair of portraits of Peter and Amy Burrell by Allan Ramsay, Painter to the King, produced about 1748, are currently on long term loan to the museum of Georgian life at No.1 Royal Crescent in Bath.
Provenance: From the Davidson Collection, and formerly the Phil Cooke Collection with labels 404 and 409. Purchased by Phil Cooke in the 1940s, probably from Cecil Bullivant (to whom the first volume of CAP was dedicated).
Reference : Howard, David S.; Chinese Armorial Porcelain, Volume I, p. 437 for an identical (possibly the same) teabowl and saucer, then in the Bullivant Collection.
Condition : Saucer with short rim hairline @ 8’clock, consolidated and virtually invisible
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