The vase is a covered cylinder on a gadrooned, spreading foot, with a pair of foliate scroll handles at the shoulder and a domed cover rising to a gilt flame finial. The ground is turquoise throughout, worked in pâte-sur-pâte: the figures and ornament are raised in white slip rather than painted, built up and tooled by hand until the thinnest passages take on the half-transparency of low relief. The method is among the most demanding of porcelain techniques. The decorator builds the relief in repeated coats of liquid white slip, each brushed on, dried, and reworked, then pares back the thinnest passages so that the coloured ground shows faintly through the figure above. The work is slow, a single piece often occupying its decorator for weeks, and it is easily lost: a slip of the tool or a flaw that opens up in the firing could spoil the whole. Its quality is judged at the edges, where the slip is thinnest and the half-transparency hardest to control. On this vase, those passages, the turn from the turquoise ground into the lit white and the fall of the drapery, are handled with the assurance that defines the best work of the studio.

The technique was developed at Sèvres and brought to Staffordshire in 1870 by Marc-Louis Solon, who left France during the Franco-Prussian War and joined Mintons, where the art director Léon Arnoux had already assembled a number of French-trained decorators. Demand soon outstripped what Solon could produce alone, and he trained a small group of apprentices to work in the manner. Alboin Birks (1860–1941) was among them. He became the firm’s leading exponent of the technique and ran the Minton pâte-sur-pâte studio, latterly almost single-handed, into the nineteen-thirties. Work of the kind of the present vase were produced in small numbers for a particular market, and is an example of the studio at its most ambitious.