Pair of Paris Porcelain Aesthetic Movement Vases with Birds, Late 1800s

A hand painted, dated pair is a real find, and these are as pretty as they are interesting. On a soft turquoise ground, each vase is painted with exotic birds perched among branches of roses, blossom and berries, with butterflies among the foliage, in the Japonisme influenced taste of the aesthetic period. Much of the decoration is raised, the flowers and berries standing proud of the surface so they catch the light and the fingertips alike, and the leaves, branches and scalloped rims are picked out in gilt. Moulded handles in the form of rust red coral branches curl up at the shoulders. Being hand painted, the two are close companions rather than identical twins, each with its own birds and blooms.

The base of each is incised with a date in the late 1800s, and the pair was catalogued at auction as Paris porcelain, the decorative white bodied Continental porcelain of the period. The style places them squarely in the Aesthetic Movement, when exotic birds, blossom and butterflies were the height of decorative fashion. Each stands 31 cm tall in a footed baluster form with a scalloped, frilled rim, a generous size made to flank a mantel or a sideboard. A matched pair is always more desirable than a single, and one dated and still together after more than a century is a lovely thing to come across.

They have survived in lovely order, the turquoise ground, the raised decoration and the painted birds all fresh and full of character, with only a little gilt rubbing and the natural mellowing of the unglazed base rims that comes with age, all shown closely in the photographs.

Set them at either end of a mantelpiece or a shelf where their symmetry can do its work, fill them with roses or branches of blossom to echo the painting, or stand them on a dresser or a windowsill for their colour alone. The turquoise and coral look wonderful against wood, cream and other ceramics, and they bring a real sense of period to a room. A dated aesthetic pair like this is hard to walk past, and harder still to find twice.