A Chinese porcelain vase with English gilt-bronze mounts. With tubular neck, having a domed cover with pomegranate finial. Painted all over in white slip with vine sprays, clambering squirrels and butterflies. The mouth is mounted with a gilt bronze cup with a reeded ring between two flat burnished rings above a cavetto moulding, and a further reeded ring between two concave ring mouldings, above a deep apron of acanthus leaves over ridged, shell-like foliage. Fitted to either side, and joined to the larger reeded ring band with a ball, is a pair of heavily cast flat scrolled handles, the outside of which is cast with a double band of guilloche; where it is attached to the shoulder below, the scroll rests on a half-palmette; the handles sit on side straps following the contours of the vase, the straps with two flat burnished outer edges enclosing a slightly concave pounced ground. The vase’s foot sits in a cup of eight heavily cast acanthus leaves on a waisted, stepped, circular moulded foot.

Supplied to the Prince Regent, for Carlton House, by the Vulliamys whose bill of £388 10s for the mounting was submitted in 1816 (National Archives LC 11/20). Pyne’s Royal Residences (Pyne 1819, II, pl. opp. p. 58, p. 60) illustrates the pair of vases in the Golden Drawing Room at Carlton House, where they were placed on stepped gilt plinths. At Buckingham Palace, they may be seen in J. Roberts’s 1857 watercolour of the Principal Corridor.

Text adapted from Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen: Volume II.