Tea Box

ca. 1870-1880

Christopher Dresser

An outstanding figure in the revitalisation of the British decorative arts, Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) embodied all the aspects of creation and industrial production with huge Victorian factories and contracts to supply the new department stores. The Great London Exhibition of 1862 fired his enthusiasm with its rich display of Japanese artistic objects. He visited Japan in 1876–1877 and published Japan: Its Architecture, Art and Art-Manufactures, in which he showed that Japan made little distinction between formal vocabulary and rationalised production processes. This tea caddy was thus designed, like numerous other objects, for mass production by the Minton factory.