18 
House 
& Carden 
Chelsea porcelain 
figurine bottle-vase 
from the collection 
of Mrs. Emma 
Hodge 
THE FASCINATING STORY of OLD CHELSEA 
So Rare Is this Ware Today that Four or Five Veritable Pieces 
Are Considered a Collection 
GARDNER TEALL 
Illustrations by courtesy of Mrs. Emma Hodge, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 
O LD CHELSEA —with 
what associations is the 
name endowed! 
Here came the wits, Smol¬ 
lett, Steele, Swift, Horace Wal¬ 
pole and others of the monde. 
Those were the days when 
Chelsea was still a village of 
the 18th Century, boasting of 
Ranelagh and its gayeties on 
the one hand and Cremorne 
Gardens on the other. Here 
was the manor Henry VIII 
had given to Catherine Parr 
when Chelsea was completely 
rural; in Walpole’s time it was 
just beginning to be truly 
suburban, while now it is so 
integral a part of London that 
it might long ago have had its 
identity swallowed up but for 
the perpetuation of its literary, 
artistic and historical atmos¬ 
phere by Carlyle and his circle 
and by Whistler and his. • 
The fifteen years from 1750 to 1765 com¬ 
prised the period of old Chelsea’s social hey¬ 
day, though the aftermath was not without its 
distinctly brilliant though somewhat irascible 
flashes. These were years demanding fine 
things for the fashionables. Horace Walpole 
and others had stirred up the passion for 
chinaware and the English porcelain and pot¬ 
tery manufacturers were kept busy not only to 
supply the demand but to meet the exacting 
quality of that demand, which called for per¬ 
fection in fabrique. With this in mind it is 
not at all strange that some enterprising potter 
with a provident eye to business should have 
decided on establishing a porcelain factory at 
Chelsea. Just when this venture was estab¬ 
lished, History has neglected to disclose, but it 
must have been somewhere around 1740. We 
do know definitely, however, that the Chelsea 
porcelain works were already celebrated for 
it i 
(Above) Chelsea porce¬ 
lain candlelabra and vase. 
The work on the candle¬ 
labra is especially deli¬ 
cate. Courtesy Metro¬ 
politan Museum of Art 
The sapient old owl to 
the left is in Chelsea 
porcelain, an excellent ex¬ 
ample of the animal fig¬ 
ures. From the Hodge 
Collection 
A Rockingham porcelain “cot¬ 
tage” from the Hodge Collection 
their wares in the year 1745. 
Some students of keram'cs 
believe a very early date should 
be assigned to Chelsea pro¬ 
ductions. It is even possible 
that porcelain was being made 
in the village as early as 1682, 
the year in which was begun 
the old hospital for invalid 
soldiers, designed by Sir Chris¬ 
topher Wren. Of course, as 
Oriental porcelain had been 
introduced into England some 
fifty years before that—1631, 
to be exact—it is likely enough 
that works for the purpose of 
imitating it were established 
in Chelsea. Horace Walpole 
made note of very early “speci¬ 
mens of Chelsea blue and 
white.” Perhaps these were 
the sort of crude porcelain 
which Dr. Martin Lister re¬ 
ferred to in an account of 
his visit to France in 1695, 
wherein he mentions the superiority of the 
“Potterie of St. Clou” over the “gomroon ware” 
of England, although he observes that the En¬ 
glish were “better masters of the art of paint¬ 
ing than the Chineses,” a statement that might 
have applied to Chelsea porcelains of the gom¬ 
roon, or imitation-oriental genre, productions 
perhaps antedating the native English develop¬ 
ment in decoration. 
The French manufacturers of 1745 had be¬ 
come concerned at the strides taken by the 
English potters and they petitioned accordingly 
for the privilege of establishing a soft porce¬ 
lain factory at Vincennes, complaining of the 
competition of English wares of Chelsea. Such 
early porcelains extant and ascribed to a period 
co-eval with that of the porcelain of St. Cloud 
exhibit a clumsiness and lack of finish. Al¬ 
ready the village of Chelsea had become well- 
known in the industrial world through its 
