Anna Burnside
Head of Sale
The Lyn and Maurice Hillis Collection
Lot 211
An important Liverpool (William Reid) large jug, circa 1756-58
11 June 2025, 10:30 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £11,520 inc. premium
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Fergus Gambon
Director
An important Liverpool (William Reid) large jug, circa 1756-58
Of ovoid form with a dramatic upward-pointing scrolled spout and scroll handle, painted in bright enamel colours with a Chinese boy in striped trousers perched on a fence under a berried tree, blowing bubbles up into the sky, the reverse with a finely dressed Chinese lady, her right hand raised, a flying insect above and to the sides of the spout, where the scroll-moulding is also picked out in red, flowers trailing along the handle and 'comma' motifs flanking the terminals, 21cm high
Footnotes
Provenance
Lyn and Maurice Hillis Collection
The Hillis Collection is largely blue and white, but it was an obvious choice to place this impressive polychrome jug on the cover of the book which has come to be something of a bible for collectors of Liverpool porcelain. The chapter on William Reid in Maurice Hillis' Liverpool Porcelain (2011) does much to cement the important work done before, collating more recent archaeology carried out at Brownlow Hill with previous excavations and scholarship. The present lot is illustrated, as mentioned, on the dust jacket cover, and also on p.31, fig.3.22 and p.56, fig.3.97. It shows Reid's playful chinoiserie decoration at its best on a large scale, the child blowing bubbles still as delightful today as it must have been to the 18th century viewer. A number of jugs with a form of mask moulding to the spout are illustrated by Hillis, with underglaze blue decoration or enamelled flowers and exotic birds variously painted in styles taken from Chinese porcelain or from Continental prototypes, perhaps via Worcester. Conversely, Reid's Chinese figures do not appear to be copied from any source in particular and as Hillis concludes 'seem to have been a Liverpudlian creation'.
