Photo from 1851 Exibition.

Engraving “Objects selected from a dessert service presented by Queen Victoria to The Emperor of Austria”.

Shape Number: 603
The figures designed by Pierre Emile Jeannest.
Factory description: Large Seasons Basket
From 1851 Queen Victoria’s turquoise dessert service.
The shape number reference is from The Minton Archive.

The sale to Queen Victoria at the 1851 Great Exhibition of a spectacular 116-piece turquoise-ground dessert service secured the luxury tablewares market for Minton & Co. for the following two decades. The official exhibition catalogue announced that 69 pieces of the ‘Victoria’ service, as it became known – purchased at the preview for 1,000 guineas – had been given by Her Majesty to the Emperor of Austria. Each piece was individually painted with cupids, flowers or fruit against a vibrant turquoise ground, imitating the famous bleu-céleste of the Sèvres factory.
It received critical acclaim for its unique combination of glazed bone china with Parian (unglazed porcelain) statuary figures modeled by the French sculptor Pierre-Emile Jeannest (1813–57).
Queen Victoria went on to order Minton turquoise-ground services for Windsor Castle and Balmoral, influencing the purchases of England’s aristocratic consumers, such as Col. Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant (1800–86), later 1st Baron Penrhyn, who in 1859 ordered a Victoria service for Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd. In 1864-5, the politician William Tatton Egerton (1806–83), created 1st Baron Egerton of Tatton in 1859, ordered a large Minton turquoise-ground dessert service with a double ‘E’ cipher under a baron’s coronet.

A page from The Art Journal The Industry of All Nations Illustrated Catalogue 1851.