An iconic piece, this unusually-shaped teapot designed in 1881 by the Royal Worcester Porcelain Factory is the ultimate caricature of the Aesthetic movement and its followers. Probably designed by 'Budge' (whose identity remains unknown) and modelled by James Hadley, the teapot embodies both a male and female Aesthete in typical Aesthetic dress, with their joined heads as the lid, bent arms as the handle and limp-wristed hands becoming the spout.

Both sides of the teapot feature motifs commonly associated with the Aesthetic movement, namely the sunflower and the lily, with the green tones of their dress likely to be a deliberate reference to ‘greenery-yallery, Grosvenor gallery’, a line from the 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan opera ‘Patience’, itself a satire of the Aesthetic movement. The humorous and mocking nature of the teapot is reinforced by the inscription on its base, which reads ‘Fearful consequences through the laws of Natural Selection and evolution of living up to one’s Teapot’. This is an anti-Aesthetic joke combining Darwin’s theory of evolution with Oscar Wilde’s famous quip that every day he found it ‘harder and harder to live up to’ his blue china. ‘Chinamania’ and the behaviours of Aesthetic artists and followers were much parodied at the time, principally by the cartoonist George Du Maurier, who published many satirical cartoons in the pages of Punch magazine between 1873 and 1881. The Aesthetic movement’s fierce and foolish love for blue-and-white china and teapots over all else formed much of the satire, and this teapot humorously represents the Aesthete’s evolution into his or her most prized possession. With a registration mark for 1881, this novelty teapot tells us of both the popularity and derision of the Aesthetic movement at the beginning of the 1880s.