(England 1744–1769)
22.3 x 10.5 x 6.7 cm
The bird is copied from a plate in Part 2 of George Edwards’s ‘Natural history of uncommon birds’ published in 1747. The original drawing made from a bird in the garden of Sir Hans Sloane is in Drayton Hall, Charleston, South Carolina. If the Chelsea decorator had consulted Edwards’s text he would have known that the bird should have a breast of ‘black with a purple gloss’.
Richard Beresford (England; Australia) (Author), Eighteenth - Century European Porcelain in the Kenneth Reed collection, Sydney, 2012, 54 (colour illus.). cat.no. 58