Each of this pair stands a little over eight inches high: a deep ivory-ground vessel raised on four gilt scroll feet, the rim cut with a pierced gallery of interlaced loops picked out in white and gold, the sides drawn up to a pair of foliate scroll handles. Into the principal face, and into the reverse, is set a rectangular panel reserved on a chocolate-brown field, the figures raised not in pigment but in white slip, built and tooled by hand until the thinnest passages carry the true half-transparency of relief. An olive-green frame gilt with an entwined ribbon encloses each scene, and the angles are filled with gilt-enriched panels in the Bérainesque taste, of the most disciplined kind.

The process is pâte-sur-pâte, paste on paste, the most exacting form of decoration the Victorian porcelain manufactory attempted. Its relief is raised in successive coats of liquid white slip, each laid with the brush, dried, and worked again, the thinnest passages pared back so that the fired ground glows through the figure above it. A single piece might occupy its decorator for many weeks, and a slip of the tool, or a flaw drawn out by the kiln, could destroy the whole. The technique had been brought to a high pitch at Sèvres; it came to Staffordshire in 1870 in the person of Marc-Louis Solon, who had left France during the Franco-Prussian war and was received at Mintons, where Léon Arnoux had already assembled an extraordinary company of French-trained hands. Demand soon exceeded what one man could supply, and Solon trained about him a studio of apprentices to carry the labour forward.

Each bears the gilt-crowned globe mark with the banner MINTONS, the plural form adopted by the firm from 1873, above a scrolled ribbon for the retailer, Thomas Goode & Co., of South Audley Street. Impressed into the body are a second MINTONS and the date cypher for 1883, a painted code alongside. The Goode mark places the pair with the most fashionable London china house of the age, the establishment that served royalty and the aristocracy, and commissioned for its own counters the finest wares the factories could furnish; its proprietor, William James Goode, was himself a collector of eighteenth-century Sèvres, the very tradition from which pâte-sur-pâte descended. In the slip panels appears the monogram AB, for Albion Birks, the last and the most accomplished of Solon’s pupils, who would conduct Minton’s pâte-sur-pâte studio almost alone into the nineteen-thirties.

Dating to 1883, the coolers date to the beginning of his esteemed career, in the service of the most exacting retailer in London. The quality lies in the modelling: the soft passage from the brown ground into the lit slip, and the half-transparency drawn out at the thinnest edges, are precisely the places in which a lesser decorator failed, and in which Birks did not. Both panels are carried with the same economy, the slip pared back until the ground tells faintly through.

These are bottle coolers, vessels for the chilling of wine at the dessert, and they belong to a service of real ambition. A centrepiece from that same service was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 and is recorded by Aslin and Atterbury in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Minton 1798–1910 of 1976; a comparable centrepiece passed through Christie’s in 2000. Pâte-sur-pâte of this order was made in small quantities for a narrow and discerning market and survives in matched pairs more rarely still; they represent Victorian porcelain manufactory at its height.