The serving of fashionable hot drinks, namely tea, coffee and chocolate, was often the focal point of domestic social rituals in the eighteenth-century. Porcelain tea and coffee sets with matching trays (déjeuners) were made for small groups, couples or individuals to serve themselves in private apartments. The design and elaboration of the decoration of the services signalled their owner’s taste and wealth. This service would have probably have contained two teacups, two coffee cups and saucers and a coffee pot, as well as the teapot, hot milk jug and sugar bowl. The milk jug has a cover, as milk was sometimes served hot with both tea and coffee in the 18th century.

The decoration of playful cherubs or putti, symbolic of 'Love', all enamelled in shades of puce, harks back to an earlier style made popular in the 1750s at the royal French porcelain factory of Vincennes/Sèvres. At that time, this type of decoration after engravings by the artist François Boucher, epitomised the exuberance and sweetness of the rococo style. Here, however, the cherubs have been used to decorate pleasingly simple shapes that are completely in keeping with the new prevailing style of the final quarter of the 18th century, neoclassicism.

This service demonstrates that styles and fashions changed slowly on the whole and that while the decoration is somewhat old-fashioned for the 1770s, the factory's customers could of course commission or buy services with putti if that is what they liked.

Situated in French-speaking Belgium near the French border today, Tournai was part of the Austrian Netherlands, under Habsburg rule when the porcelain factory was established in about 1750. Ceramics had been made in Tournai for centuries, as there are rich clay deposits in the region. The manufacture of porcelain, however, was only made possible by the arrival of two brothers, Robert and Gilles Dubois, from France. They had previously been employed at the Mennecy and Vincennes factories there, and brought the secrets of porcelain manufacture with them.