A covered ice cup from the Service for the Order of Saint George, Gardner Porcelain Factory, Verbilki, circa 1777-1778

Commissioned by the Empress Catherine II of Russia, the service of the Order of St. George was delivered in 1778 by Francis Gardner's private Factory. The set, intended to serve eighty people, cost 6,000 roubles. The decorator GI Kozlov designed this service based on the Berlin porcelain set presented to Catherine II by Frederick II of Prussia in 1772. The four grand services of the Imperial Orders (St. George, St. Andrew, St. Alexander Nevsky and St. Vladimir) were housed in the storerooms of the Winter Palace and each used once a year during the ceremony in honor of the Knights of the correlating Order. The Order of St. George service was first used on 26 November 1778 and for the last time on 26 November 1916.

A large part of this service was kept in the collections of the Hermitage Museum and several items in the collections of the Hillwood Museum in Washington D.C. (K. Taylor, Russian Art at Hillwood, Washington, 1988, Fig. 105, p.72 and L. Nikifora, Russian Porcelain in the Hermitage, Leningrad, 1973 and the recent exhibition at the Hermitage Museum : From the dinner-service storerooms, decorating the Russian Imperial table in the Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries, the State Hermitage Museum, 2016, cat.112.4 and 12.5, p.247).