Date: 17-07-2005
Owning Institution: The Victoria and Albert Museum
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:   18th Century    

Today is the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the death of Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey, whose recipe for tea flavoured with bergamot – given to him, according to legend, by a Chinese mandarin whose life he saved – has proved enduringly popular. To mark the occasion I have chosen one of the earliest known depictions of English people drinking tea. A Family of Three at Tea was painted by Richard Collins in 1727 and may be seen in the British Galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.

Richard Collins was a portrait painter and topographical draughtsman who lived in Peterborough and painted in and around the counties of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire. Little is known about him other than that he died in 1732 and that he was a freemason. According to a contemporary source, he “initiated several persons of Spalding and other towns in freemasonry.” Perhaps the family drinking tea in the picture reproduced on this page were among those “several persons”. They brandish porcelain tea bowls imported from China, enjoying the novel luxury of a hot beverage from the Far East. The English teacup with a handle had not yet been invented and they are clearly doing their best not to burn their fingers. The formality with which the tea-table before them is laid, the darkness of the interior in which they sit, and the self-conscious, slightly secretive elegance with which they present themselves to the gaze of posterity, lends the scene the air of a private rite. The silence is broken only by the yapping of a lapdog, who looks as though he would like a sip of tea from the bowl held, so gingerly and deliberately, by the lady of the house. Perhaps it was her custom to let him finish the dregs.

Tea had been virtually unknown in Europe until the 1650s, when it was popularised by a charismatic Jesuit missionary named Father Alexander of Rhodes. After having spent thirty years in the Far East, he returned home to Paris and wrote his memoirs, which included a lengthy discourse on the benefits of tea-drinking. Father Alexander’s book also contained the first published recipe for making the beverage: “This is the way in which the Chinese take tea; boil the water in a very clean vessel; when well boiled they take it from the fire and put the leaf in. They drink it as hot as they can; if it is cold it is no use. The same leaf which is left at the bottom of the dish can be used a second time, but then it is allowed to boil with the water. The Japanese take tea in a different way, for they make a powder then pour in the boiling water which they swallow entirely. I do not know if this way of taking it is more satisfactory than the first… In both methods a little sugar is mixed with the tea to counteract the bitterness which, however, seems to me to be not disagreeable.”

Father Alexander became something of a celebrity in Paris in the 1650s. He passed on his enthusiasm for tea to a number of Englishmen living there in exile in the aftermath of the Civil War, including the poet Edmund Waller, Lord Jermyn and Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington. By the end of the decade an English writer, Thomas Garway, was singing the praises of tea. Perhaps no hot drink has ever had a warmer supporter. According to Garway, “The particular vertues are these: It maketh the Body active and lusty. It helpeth the Headache giddiness and heaviness thereof. It removeth the Obstructions of the Spleen. It is very good against the Stone and Gravel, cleansing the Kidneys and Uriters being drank with Virgins Honey instead of Sugar. It taketh away the difficulty of breathing, opening Obstructions. It is good against Lipitude Distillations and cleareth the Sight. It removeth lassitude, and cleanseth and purifieth adult Humours and a hot Liver. It is good against Crudities, strengthening the weakness of the Ventricle or Stomach, causing good Appetite and Digestion, and particularly for Men of a corpulent Body, and such as are great eaters of Flesh...” The list continues.

Tea only really caught on in Britain after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Its sudden, rapid rise in popularity can be at least partly attributed to the influence of Charles II’s Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza. The story goes that immediately on arrival at Portsmouth from Portugal, on 13 May 1662, Catherine demanded a cup of tea. To their great embarrassment, the welcoming party had none. She was offered a glass of warm ale, which she turned down in disgust.

The example set by royalty was quickly followed by the aristocracy and gentry, and the newly established East India Company began importing tea to England in ever-increasing quantities. Its popularity soon outstripped that of coffee, largely because it was much more competitively priced. The English custom of taking milk with tea – note the prominent silver milk jug on the table in Collins’s portrait – may reflect political changes in China at the moment when English imports began to accelerate. Father Alexander of Rhodes had made no mention of milk in his recipe, because his mission to the Far East occurred during the last years of the Ming dynasty, who considered the addition of dairy produce to tea a repulsive practice. The Manchu invasion of 1644 ended the Ming dynasty. The conquering Tartars had long added milk to their tea, and it was presumably from them that the English acquired the habit. The Tartar also added salt to their tea, rather than their sugar, a practice that never caught on in Europe.

Richard Collins’s portrait suggests that tea appealed to the gentry and upper middle-classes of the early eighteenth century, not only for its health-giving properties, but also because it furnished a wonderful opportunity for the conspicuous display of wealth. Almost more prominent than the family is the splendid silver “equipage” for serving the tea which they are drinking with such a beady-eyed and serious demeanour. They must have been very proud of that array of gleaming, polished objects. Peter Brown, author of a thoroughly entertaining history of beverages, In Praise of Hot Liquor, goes so far as to suggest that “the groundswell in demand for objects needed to consume chocolate, coffee and tea helped prompt the rise of the industrial revolution in Britain … transforming the country from a largely agrarian culture to one founded on a product based economy.” Which suggests that Richard Collins’s Family of Three at Tea is a deceptively peaceful record of English society on the cusp of a great economic shift. There is a storm brewing in those elegant porcelain teacups.