Broken teapot sells for £575,000

Many people would have been tempted to throw the broken teapot in the bin. One collector is glad he did not.

The blue and white teapot he bought at auction for £15 has just sold for £575,000 after being identified as one of the first porcelain pieces made in America. It was bought by a London dealer acting on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The teapot was made by John Bartlam, a British potter who emigrated to America to set up its first porcelain factory. His work was said to be so good that even the great Josiah Wedgwood feared competition from his workshop.

But Bartlam’s enterprise was cut short by the American Revolution and he returned to England.

The male collector, who specialises in “problem pieces”, spotted it at an auction in the Midlands in 2016. He bought the teapot, which had a broken, glued handle and was missing its lid, because he could not identify it despite having studied ceramics for 30 years.

He took it to Clare Durham, a specialist at Woolley and Wallis Auctioneers in Salisbury, who suspected it was the work of Bartlam, who set up a factory in South Carolina in 1783.

The collector was told that his teapot could fetch as much as £50,000. When the hammer fell the price had reached £460,000. With fees the total purchase price came to £575,000.

The teapot was bought by Rod Jellicoe, a London dealer for the New York museum.

Miss Durham said: “The vendor decided not to come to the auction but his daughter watched it online. He is very happy and thankful. The vendor is not a dealer. He likes problem pieces that are unmarked and he tries to identify. He has bought and sold odds and sods with us before but nothing like this.”

Miss Durham said the teapot was so rare that the missing lid made no difference to its value. She said: “Nothing like it will ever come on the market again so in that respect the missing lid was probably irrelevant.”

John Bartlam moved to South Carolina from Staffordshire in 1763 to make fine porcelain for the growing American market.

The collector said: “I have been studying ceramics for 30 years and I never dreamt that I would find such a rarity as this teapot.”