This very rare teapot, estimated £10,000/20,000, was purchased for £460,000 by a London dealer on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Tamzin Corbett of auctioneers Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury, Southern England, said the owner was unaware of the item’s value when he bought it for £15 at a local antiques fair in the British midlands. The teapot was made by the John Bartlam porcelain factory — the first known American porcelain manufacturer — in Cain Hoy, South Carolina, in the 1760s. One side depicts two cranes beneath a tall palm tree beside figures in a sampan and a solitary figure in another boat, and the reverse a version of the Man on the Bridge pattern, the eponymous structure linking small islands in a Chinese pagoda landscape.
Print the article
