Unlike the Continent, where the production of porcelain received royal patronage and financial support, porcelain manufacture in England was the purview of the individual entrepreneur. Traditionally the colonies had depended on the mother country for such luxury goods. However, in December 1769, the same year as the Non-Importation Agreement, Gousse Bonnin, a recent immigrant from England, and George Anthony Morris, a well-connected native of Philadelphia, announced that they would soon be producing “as good porcelain as any heretofore manufactured at the famous factory at Bow, near London.” Between 1770 and 1772, the private partnership produced fine soft-paste porcelain dinner and tea wares, decorated primarily in underglaze blue. The molded rococo forms related closely to the imported English competition, porcelain made at Bow, Lowestoft, and Plymouth. The letter “P” for Philadelphia was proudly used as a mark. However, once the colonists ended their boycott of English goods in 1770, the competition became extremely stiff. Not even a lottery was able to rescue the venture (see B.83.5), and the business closed in November 1772. While archaeological evidence indicates the production included a wide variety of forms, less than twenty examples are known today. These range from pickle stands to fruit baskets and sauceboats, all luxury goods, which may account for their survival. The present sauceboat, with its fluted body and underglaze blue chinoiserie landscape ornament, relates very closely to a model produced only a few years earlier at Plymouth.

Related Examples: Just one other sauceboat of this type is known (Hood 1972, pp. 31–32, figs. 27–29). Bayou Bend's painted scene is closely related to that on a small pickle shell (Hood 1972, fig. 10); the arc and pendent drop ornament inside the lip is repeated at the base of covered openwork dish at Williamsburg (Hood 1972, fig. 35). A Plymouth example of the same fluted design (Cushion 1982, pl. 46).

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.