This small coffee service, alternately called a cabaret service or déjeuner service, includes a tray, coffee pot, cream pot, sugar bowl, and two cups with saucers. Drinks like tea, coffee, and chocolate transformed consumption habits in Europe. Virtually unknown before the seventeenth century, these stimulating beverages came into high demand once European trading companies gained access to them through trade with Asia and the Americas. Coffeehouses and tea parlors became public sociable spaces. In the domestic realm, wealthy homes would have ceramic and silver implements for use in the ritual of preparing and serving these beverages.
Such small services, sometimes referred to as a tête-à-tête, were popular as wedding gifts. Intended to serve two, the coffee pot typically held about a pint of liquid (less than a standard service). Each component of the service would feature coordinated ornamentation. Produced at the height of the fashion for classical aesthetics, as artists looked toward ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration, the objects in this set depict figures from antiquity against a pale yellow background with gilded edges. The different narrative scenes might serve as conversation topics for the educated elite who could afford such beverages. Consumers valued porcelain for beverage services due to its durable and hygienic qualities, as well as the wide range of decoration in which manufacturers produced household objects.
Cynthia Kok
2025
