painted in Famille Rose enamels, the centre painted with a floral spray. 36.5cm wide

P.B. Cooke Collection

The collection was started in the 1920s by Phil’s father – who bought at that time from Sir Algernon Tudor-Craig, the eminent London dealer and first author of a book on armorial wares, from his gallery ‘The Century House’ in Knightsbridge, which closed around 1929. Phil continued collecting, buying much from the collector/dealer Cecil Bullivant, and by the 1960s his collection had become the largest in the world. My late husband first met him in the late ’50s and his first volume of Chinese Armorial Porcelain illustrates 220 examples from the Cooke Collection.

Angela Howard

Thanks to Angela Howard of Heirloom & Howard Ltd. for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.

The arms are of Harrington, originally of Cumbrian descent, with a number of branches in Yorkshire, impaling almost certainly Rockley. The marriage has not been traced. See Howard; Chinese Armorial Porcelain, Volume I (1974), p. 422.