A Staffordshire pearlware model of Polito’s Menagerie, circa 1825-30

The Collection of Dorothy Hirshon, sold, Sotheby's, New York, 26 September 1998, lot 233.

‘Polito's grand and pleasing assemblage of most rare and beautiful living birds and beasts, from the remotest parts of the known world…’

Nottingham Journal, 28 September 1805 (quoted from E. H. Bostock in Menageries, Circuses and Theatres, New York, 1928, pp. 7-9).

This rare Staffordshire pearlware group depicts Polito’s Menagerie, one of the earliest and most celebrated travelling menageries of wild and exotic animals in 18^th century England. It’s owner, Stephen, also known by Stephano, Stephani and Stephanus Polito, was born in Italy around 1763-64, and toured his menagerie throughout the country, allowing many people their first ever glimpse of exotic animals from around the world. In 1810, he bought the permanent menagerie located on the second floor of the Exeter Exchange on the Strand, London, originally established by the self-styled 'Modern Noah' Gilbert Pidcock. Polito renamed it the 'Royal Menagerie'.

In the Spring of 1814, Elizabeth Chivers of Bath, who kept a diary, went on a family trip around England, and on the twelfth day to London, when she visited the Menagerie, noting:

‘We next bent our course to Mr Alderman Birches where we ate a little of his delightful pastry then proceeded to Exeter Change in the Strand to see the finest collection of wild Beasts in the Kingdom, which is kept and managed by Polito [Polito's Royal Menagerie]. The great variety of animals we here saw quite astonished us, there is an Elephant, Rhinoceros and camel, a Lyon and a number of most beautiful Leopards, several Tygers, Baboon, and Monkeys and a vast many more too numerous for me to notice. In another apartment we saw a collection of most beautiful birds natives of many different countries.’¹

Polito died in April 1814, but his family continued to tour and exhibit animals under his name for the next few years. In April 1823, Polito’s went to Europe and never returned to England. It has long been held that the menagerie sank in a storm in around 1835, but there is no basis for this belief.

This rare Polito’s Menagerie group is among the most elaborate of the Staffordshire mantlepiece figure groups made in the early 19th century and typifies the quality and charm of Staffordshire figural pottery in the first three decades of the century, before the potteries began to focus on the mass production of simpler flatback figures. All the figures and architectural components would have been formed in separate two-part moulds, then carefully assembled by a 'repairer' before firing and decoration with painted and sponged enamels, thus the group would have been relatively expensive to produce. It has been suggested that Mrs Polito is the female figure at the doorway in the model and that the banner may show the elephant Chunee, Pidcock's star attraction, which was admired by Lord Byron but which killed his keeper and was destroyed in 1826. Several slightly varying models of the Polito’s Menagerie were produced, indicating that these groups were probably produced by more than one pottery firm. Versions of Polito's Menagerie are held in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (inv. no.C.128-2003), the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. no. C.965-1928) and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, and examples are illustrated and discussed by Pat Halfpenny, English Earthenware Figures 1740-1840, Woodbridge, 1991, pp. 233, pl. 67 and p. 236, pl. 68, and by Griselda Lewis, A Collector’s History of English Pottery, Woodbridge, 1999, p. 210-211. Examples that have come to auction include: one from the Estate of S. Carter Burden, sold, Sotheby’s, New York, 26 October 2002, lot 1531; another, from the collection of Josephine and Walter Buhl Ford II, sold, Sotheby’s, New York, 6 October 2006, lot 227; and a third, Property from the Country Home of Christopher Cone and Stanley J. Seeger, sold, Sotheby's, London, 30 October 2018, lot 70; another was sold at Bonhams, London, 15 December 2020, lot 80; and another, a very similar model to the present example, at Bonhams, London, 14 December 2023, lot 245.

1. The diary is held in the Museum of London collection.