Stunning First Period Worcester Porcelain Parrot Pecking Fruit Mask Jug c.1775

Superb Worcester porcelain mask jug with cabbage leaf moulding to the body and vertical fluting to the neck. Printed with the Parrot Pecking Fruit pattern, c.1775, with a interlocking cell border inside and outside the rim. Aside from the main central image of the parrot surrounded by harvested fruit and vegetables, are a suite of subsidiary prints, only found on the larger items in this pattern, including a bunch of gooseberries, a spray of currants, a trundling beetle and an oddly shaped upside down snail. Other smaller sprigs and two larger arrangements around an apple and a squash are dotted around the neck and a rather incongruous neoclassical type pattern down the back of the handle. Unmarked. Reference Worcester Blue & White Porcelain, Branyon, French & Sandon, section II.B.23. This pattern in the main is not uncommon but is rarely found on the large mask jugs and additionally with the cell border.