Tea caddy with cover 1780 - 1790

This tea caddy with cover was made at the Höchst Manufactory, a German porcelain workshop, likely in the late eighteenth century. The hard-paste porcelain body is decorated with delicate monochrome painting, and gilded trim. Porcelain, often called ‘white gold’, had a particular cachet in the eighteenth century. This was not just for its beauty, but because of the tremendous effort required to produce it. From mining the raw materials like kaolin, to shaping the clay, to firing at extremely high temperatures, it was a painstaking, costly, and labor-intensive process. The tea caddy would have been an expensive, luxury product. Tea itself was an imported commodity, harvested by an exploited workforce in Asia, shipped across the globe, and consumed by the wealthy. The caddy depicts a hot air balloon, a marvel of the age, suggesting the owner’s sophistication and worldliness. Taken together, the porcelain, the tea, and the balloon all speak to the circulation of materials and ideas in a dawning age of globalization.