Worcester Grainger | Egyptian Lotus & Vine Five-Piece Porcelain Serving Set | Graduated Platters, Sauce Tureen & Underplate | C. 1889–1903

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…A Complete Transitional Era Service — Preserved Intact Through Generations of Elegant Cape Cod Entertaining & Acquired Directly from a … Read more …A Complete Transitional Era Service — Preserved Intact Through Generations of Elegant Cape Cod Entertaining & Acquired Directly from a Distinguished Provincetown Family Estate

THERE are collections that arrive already complete — assembled not by a dealer or an auction house, but by a family, over time, with the kind of quiet devotion that only reveals itself when the estate is finally settled and the doors of the summer cottage close for the last time. This is one of those collections.
We are delighted to offer this extraordinary five-piece Royal Worcester Grainger service — three graduated serving platters, a sauce tureen, and its original underplate — recently acquired from the estate of a distinguished old Cape Cod family whose summer cottage in Provincetown, Massachusetts served as the backdrop for generations of elegant seaside entertaining. These pieces were not purchased together at auction or assembled for resale. They were lived with, carefully tended, and handed down. That they arrive together, in this condition, after more than a century, is itself a kind of minor miracle.

THE SERVICE — Five Pieces, Complete
Three graduated platters anchor the service: a grand 17" × 14" presentation platter, a generous 15" × 12" serving platter, and a more intimate 12" × 9" piece — each one a self-contained statement, together an exercise in Victorian abundance and proportion. The sauce tureen — 9"W × 6"D × 4"H — arrives with its original underplate, lid intact, a matched pair that has traveled more than a century without separation. That completeness alone speaks volumes about the care with which successive generations of this Cape Cod family preserved what they inherited.
— Large Presentation Platter: 17"L × 14"W
— Medium Serving Platter: 15"W × 12"D × 1.25"H
— Small Serving Platter: 12"W × 9"D × 1.25"H
— Sauce Tureen with Lid: 9"W × 6"D × 4"H
— Original Tureen Underplate: included

THE DESIGN
Across every piece, the Egyptian lotus and vine motif unfolds with the unhurried confidence of a workshop that knew it was making something lasting. Soft pinks and greens — never garish, never timid — are beautifully accented with lustrous gold detailing against a pristine white porcelain ground. It is an aesthetic that belongs equally to the great Victorian romance with the Orient and to the Arts & Crafts movement's insistence on the beauty of natural form, rendered here with the technical mastery that only the finest English porcelain houses could command.
The sauce tureen is where the painter's art truly reveals itself. At three-dimensional scale — with lid, body, handles, and underplate all demanding consistent pattern application — lesser workshops faltered. Grainger Worcester did not falter. The lotus flows across every surface as if it grew there.

A service of this pattern, quality, and completeness was almost certainly commissioned as part of an elaborate wedding trousseau — created not for the everyday, but for the grandest occasions of a life well and fully lived. That it found its way to a Provincetown summer cottage, and remained there through the decades intact, is the kind of happy accident that makes collecting worthwhile.

THE LEGACY
In 1889, following the death of George Grainger, his celebrated factory was acquired by Royal Worcester. Production of the finest Grainger china continued at the St. Martin's Gate works — later christened the Royal China Works — until 1902. This transitional period, brief and never to be repeated, represents some of the most extraordinary porcelain ever to emerge from the combined workshops. Royal Worcester preserved Grainger's exacting standards while quietly incorporating their own innovations, yielding a body of work now recognized by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic as among the very finest English porcelain ever produced. Pieces from this era in rare patterns are increasingly scarce. A five-piece service, intact, with this provenance, is a genuinely uncommon find.


VERY good vintage condition throughout. All five pieces present beautifully, consistent with their age and the care with which they were preserved. The tureen retains its lid and rests perfectly on its underplate.Acquired directly from the estate of a distinguished old Cape Cod family, Provincetown, Massachusetts — where this service graced the summer table through generations of gracious seaside entertaining.
Always elegant, always collected — and made, as they made things then, to last for generations. See less