Victorian Pottery Pot Lids Featuring Chinese Scenes, mid-1840s

Four Victorian prattware (a style of English earthenware produced from roughly 1780-1840 by F & R Pratt & Co. of Staffordshire) pottery pot lids comprising top left and right – Transplanting Rice and The Harbour of Hong Kong and bottom left to right The Chin-Chew River, and The Ning Po River. The pots were produced by the Pratts Factory in or around 1846 -1849 and may have been influenced by the then Second Opium War with China. The images are reproductions of watercolours by J.Austin from the originals by Thomas Allom in the then popular book China Illustrated (1845). Allom (who never went to China) was inspired well by sketches made by Captain Stoddart (a Royal Navy officer and artist in the First Opium War).