Chelsea Botanical Porcelain

Shaped circular dish, chocolate coloured rim, decorated with a lily, butterfly, dragonfly, ladybird and blue flowered plant.

In July 1758 an announcement of a sale of Chelsea porcelain in Dublin listed a service decorated ‘in curious plants, with Table Plates, Soup Plates and Dessert Plates enamelled from Sir Hans Sloan’s plants’. This distinguished it from the usual Chelsea wares decorated with so-called ‘Indian’ or chinoiserie flowers. Instead these were botanically accurate illustrations – the designs based on the plants growing in the Chelsea Physic Gardens which were in the immediate neighbourhood of the porcelain factory, on the banks of the Thames. Hans Sloane (1660-1753), a President of the Royal Society and resident of Chelsea, had purchased the land in which the gardens had been founded in the 1720s, granting a lease in perpetuity to the Society of Apothecaries. The gardens allowed apprentice apothecaries to identify medicinally useful plants, but it also had a sheltered aspect which meant that more exotic specimens could survive there. The Society appointed Philip Miller, a renowned gardener, as curator of the Physic Garden in 1722.

Miller published a number of works aimed at gardeners and in 1756 he produced a work entitled ‘Figures of Plants’. This contained a collection of 300 illustrations of specimens drawn from the Physic Garden. The illustrations were the work of German artist, George Dionysius Ehret (1708-70), who visited England in 1734 and lodged with Miller. His first visit lasted only a year, but he later returned and remained in England, marrying Miller’s sister-in-law, Susanna Kennet.

In the tradition of medieval herbals, Ehret’s illustrations often combined a number of plants in one plate. He usually included cross-sections of the specimens, as well as the insects relevant to the pollination of the plant. A number of Ehret’s illustrations relate directly to decorations on Chelsea wares – including the insects and the cross-section diagrams, albeit adapted in layout to fit the shape of the porcelain works. However, many of the other porcelain decorations do not appear to have a source in Ehret and it may be that the artists were working directly from the plants in the Physic Gardens themselves. Sir Hans Sloane died in 1753 but the porcelain factory’s continued use of his name was clearly a marketing ploy to lend an intellectual appeal to their wares.

Text adapted from The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy 1714 – 1760, London, 2014