TEAPOT

Affordable Art

Fine Art giclée Print

Original works: James Hadley 1882

Print Dimensions: 34cm x 30cm

Made by James Hadley, the preeminent modeler at the Royal Worcester Porcelain Factory, this teapot references the Aesthetic Movement that was fashionable in the late 19th century. The teapot partly capitalized on the success of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s operetta Patience, a satire of the Aesthetic Movement that was first performed in 1881, the year the vessel was produced.  Living up to One’s Teapot—an allusion to something Oscar Wilde said while he was a student at Oxford University in England: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” The teapot’s base is a double-edged satire, mocking Wilde’s overwrought attention to all things aesthetic, as well as Darwin’s newly introduced theory of natural selection, which was scoffed at for its implication that humans descended from apes.