A Worcester dessert service by Chamberlain - history of service donated to Baltimore Museum of Art

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2000 by Mavis A. Cleggett

After the shipment of the 1816 and 1818 orders from Chamberlain to William Brown in Liverpool, little is known of the subsequent history of the service. As suggested earlier, Brown presumably shipped them to his family in Baltimore. Eventually, at least the twenty-six pieces now in the Baltimore Museum came into the possession of Mrs. Miles White Jr., who was born Virginia Purviance Bonsal and was a member of a prominent Maryland family. [11] She bequeathed the twenty-six pieces to her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Francis White, who gave them to the museum. Mrs. Miles White, a patron of the arts, helped to establish the Baltimore Museum, and in 1933 presented it with a fine collection of early Maryland silver. It is not known when she acquired the Brown pieces or whether she originally had more.

Thirteen additional pieces from the service were sold at three sales at Sotheby's in New York City on April 11 and October 20, 1997, and April 16, 1998. The first sale comprised four ice plates consigned from the Baltimore region. One was decorated with feathers, another with birds, and two with landscapes identified on the plates as The Bridge and Village of Rydal, Westmoreland and Brathay Bridge, Westmoreland. [12] Four more pieces from a collection in Virginia were consigned to the October 20 sale. These were a shell-shaped dish decorated with feathers, a square dish decorated with exotic birds, and two ice plates, one decorated with feathers and the other with a peacock and a smaller bird. [13] The April 1998 sale consisted of a lozenge-shaped dish decorated with feathers and four dessert plates showing Topping a Flight of Rails, and Coming Well into the Next Field (see Pls. IV, VII), Waterloo Church Seen from the Wood of Soigne from the Reeve engravings (Pl. X and Fig. 5), Windsor Castle from Slough, and Grasmere, Cumberland. [14]

Adding the objects sold at Sotheby's to those in the Baltimore Museum yields a total of nearly half the original service. It would be sensible to conclude that a quarter of the service has now been lost altogether, but it is possible that the remaining quarter is still scattered in various private collections in the United States.

For their assistance I would like to thank Harry Frost, formerly the curator of the Museum of Worcester Porcelain in Worcester; James A. Abbott, the curator of decorative arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as M. B. Munford and Catherine S. Thomas of the museum; Caroline de Guitaut of the Royal Collection Trust; Martin Clayton of the print room of the Royal Library; Deborah Hall of the map library at the British Library in London; Denise Tambourini, the bursar of the Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool; Bob Jones, the assistant librarian in the Liverpool Record Office; Lisa Ann Libby of the rare book department at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California; and Letitia Roberts of Sotheby's in New York City

MAVIS A. CLEGGETT is a long-time student of English ceramics made between 1790 and 1840.