The Worcester-born artist and publisher Valentine Green noted in his 1795 Histories and Antiquities of the City and Suburbs of Worcester that in its earliest decade, the city’s porcelain company “confined themselves principally to making blue and white ware.” This piece, which forms part of a wider gift of the William and Mary Ann Margaretten collection of early English porcelain, represents one of the most attractive but also rare patterns of this earliest phase of production at the factory. Such patterns were rendered by applying cobalt iron oxide mixed with water or oil with a handheld brush onto biscuitware (plain white porcelain fired without a glaze) before glazing and firing the piece. The cobalt mixture would initially be black or brown, and it would only acquire its striking blue coloration after the firing process. These pieces are made of a type of soft-paste porcelain, formulated in the absence of kaolin or china clay. Instead, Worcester used Cornish soapstone, which enabled their productions to be fired at lower temperatures than its Continental or Asian equivalents. These wares were broadly popular; in 1763, the Oxford Journal extolled “the extraordinary strength and cheapness of the common sort of blue and white Worcester porcelain.”