This beautiful tea cup was bequeathed to Berwick in 1955 by Ernest Edward Cook, the grandson of Thomas Cook, founder of the travel business.
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The Nymphenburg Porcelain Factory was founded in 1747 in Neudeck, Bavaria but was then moved to the grounds of the Nymphenburg Palace in 1761. The porcelain produced there was highly prized and was often referred to as ‘white gold’. The factory was known for its painted figurines in a Rococo style but from the 1880s dinner services such as this one at Berwick Museum & Art Gallery became popular. Each piece was hand painted in shades of blue, and were decorated with Bavarian pastoral scenes.
Several of the landscape scenes in this service depict the English Garden in Munich, which was created the by the American expatriate Benjamin Thompson in the 1790s. He was inspired by the English landscape gardens of Capability Brown and William Chambers.
This find would not have been possible without the generous funding of the John Ellerman Foundation.
