LONDON.- A very rare Elizabethan silver and porcelain goblet fashioned by an English goldsmith using a tea bowl imported from Ming China comes for sale at auction in London next month. The previously unrecorded piece is expected to sell for £6000-8000 at Chiswick Auctions on March 23.

Chiswick’s silver specialist John Rogers had been excited when sent an image of the tiny goblet via email. He had visited the seller’s home in Hammersmith the next day and was happy to confirm the discovery of an important and valuable piece.

At a time when Europeans poured and drank from relatively crude stonewares and earthenwares, snow white porcelain imported from China was hugely expensive in 16th century Europe. The handful of pieces that made the journey to England were held in the utmost esteem and often mounted in gold and silver in much the same way as other ‘exotics’ such as coconuts, nautilus shells or Iznik pottery. Very few pieces have survived intact.

This particular vessel, standing 13cm high combines a Kraak blue and white porcelain tea bowl from the reign of the Wanli emperor (1573–1620) with a strapwork and openwork silver mount of a type that was fashionable from c.1580-1600. As tea was not yet drunk in Britain, it was mounted for use as a wine goblet. Unmarked, it probably post-dates by a decade or so the earliest dated piece of English silver mounted Chinese porcelain (the Lennard Cup of 1569 in the British Museum) and is probably contemporary with the four items of silver-mounted Wanli porcelain once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The full history of this rediscovered piece is unknown. However, it comes by descent from Arthur Abraham Clifford De Pinna (1889-1947), a “second hand” furniture dealer in Piccadilly whose cousin was the London dealer in Oriental porcelain Alfred Samson de Pinna (1868-1963). By family repute the two cousins did work together before a significant falling out sometime before Arthur became bankrupt in 1932. It shares the same provenance history as a Ming blue and white porcelain ‘canteen bottle’ now in the Smithsonian museum which was sold by the vendor’s family through Sotheby’s in 1957.

“Secular silver from the Tudor and early Stuart period is renowned for its rarity” says John Rogers. “For an item of Elizabethan silver mounted porcelain to have remained in private ownership for easily over a century and not be published as part of great collections or scholastic texts is a remarkable rarity.”