The taste shared by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert for the ‘cinquecento’ style manifested itself as much in their acquisitions of plate as elsewhere. The design of this vase appears to have been fixed by early May 1852, although the completed object was not hallmarked until 1854, and the stand seems to have been made much later, in time for the Queen's birthday in 1859 (it appears in a watercolour of the Queen's Birthday Table by James Roberts). Prince Albert ordered another vase from Hunt & Roskell in 1852, which, like this one, featured mythical subjects: this one has scenes of Venus and Adonis and Thetis presenting Vulcan's armour to Achilles, and was originally surmounted by a kneeling figure of Psyche. The Prince's vase (no longer in the Royal Collection) was chased with the combat of Lapiths and Centaurs and mounted in the Renaissance manner with lapis lazuli and carnelian. Both vases were sent to the 1855 Paris exhibition where they were judged by one critic to have been ‘exécutés… avec perfection’.

According to the official catalogue, which was fairly critical of the showing of the English goldsmiths at the exhibition, Hunt & Roskell were among only three firms that saved the reputation of the country, the others being the jewellers Hancocks and R. & S. Garrard, who displayed the Alhambra Table Fountain. Hunt & Roskell's reputation was no doubt enhanced by their employment of the Frenchman Antoine Vechte, who had fled to London in 1848. The catalogue, making much of his Continental origins, claimed that Vechte's figures ‘rapellent les grands maîtres florentins, même Michel-Ange…’.

John Samuel Hunt had trained as a chaser himself and was well aware of the skill of the Frenchman. His work had been well received at the Great Exhibition in 1851 where a vase representing the Titans, and a shield dedicated to Shakespeare, Milton and Newton, were highly praised by the Jury: ‘These works show that no living artist has so fully entered into the spirit of the Italian style of the sixteenth century’.

Text from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love.