Rare coffee cup & saucer, c.1755, for the American Market with the arms of Vaughan impaling Hallowell
Two separate grisaille services, comprising both dinner and tea wares, were made in the mid 1750s with the arms of Vaughan impaling Hallowell, copying a very finely engraved ‘Chippendale’ bookplate (Franks 30276). They differ only in the fact that one includes the name ‘Samuel Vaughan’ beneath the arms and one does not. It is possible, therefore, that inclusion of the name represents an error in interpretation of the original order which was rectified with a new order.
The painting of the porcelain is equally detailed and refined. By the mid century this palette was at the height of its popularity with the technique mastered on the many orders of finely detailed and cross-hatched European engravings which by now had been replicated on porcelain. The use of bookplates as a pattern for armorial porcelain proved equally successful, especially those painted en grisaille which could be copied with heraldic exactitude, while they were also easy to transport to China. The only significant difference between the Vaughan bookplate and the porcelain is that the motto on the former reads ‘Christi servitus vera libertas’ while that on the porcelain is ‘In prudentia et simplicitate’.
Samuel Vaughan (1720-1802) was born in Ireland where his merchant adventurer grandfather, William, had settled near Clonmel in Co. Tipperary, receiving the Ballyboe Estate as a spoil of war. They were a wealthy family though Samuel, as twelfth son, had little prospect of inheritance. He was sent as a merchant apprentice to Jamaica in 1736 and within ten years had enough wealth to become a plantation owner. Visiting Boston, he married in 1747 Sarah Hallowell, daughter of Benjamin Hallowell, the King’s Naval Commissioner, who was a major shareholder in the ‘Kennebec Purchase’ owning 1½ million acres of best agricultural land in Maine.
Returning first to Jamaica and then to London in 1752, while also maintaining an estate in Ireland, Vaughan established a banking house and merchant business under the name Samuel Vaughan (later “& Sons”), becoming an influential political radical and supporter of the American cause for liberty, and a close associate and friend of Benjamin Franklin, a founding father of the new United States.
Preparing to emigrate as soon as peace was declared, the Vaughans returned in 1783 to the new capital, Philadelphia, where Samuel designed the Pennsylvania State House Garden and also drew up plans for George Washington’s garden at Mount Vernon. As a close friend of Washington, it was he who commissioned the original painting (‘the Vaughan Portrait’) of the first president by the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This porcelain would no doubt have accompanied them, in addition to a later service with enamels, ordered about 1770.
Reference : Howard, David S.; Chinese Armorial Porcelain, Volume I, p.359, and also Volume II, p.238
Condition : Perfect with very strong grisaille penwork
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