A pair of Royal George III silver-gilt perfume bottles , Thomas Heming, London, London, 1771

on square bases, acanthus capped corners, chased and engraved with floral sprays, engraved with the cypher of Queen Charlotte, screw-on stoppers

Following his ascension to the throne in 1760 and two weeks before their coronation, George III married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz on 8 September 1761 at the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace, London. The perfume bottles offered here, made a decade later as part of a complete dressing table set, may very well have been privately commissioned by the Queen herself or were a gift to her in celebration of  her tenth wedding anniversary. This uncertainly arises from the fact that the service is not mentioned in the Jewel House records. Heming's toilet service for Queen Charlotte has long been admired, as upon its presumed first appearance in public when sold by Christie's as part of her effects on 19 May 1819 (coincidentally the same month as Queen Victoria's birth), when it was described as the 'SUPERB SERVICE OF SILVER GILT TOILET PLATE . . . enriched with roses and other flowers, richly chased in bold taste.' The Queen's love of fresh flowers is manifest in another 1771 commission, the portrait of her by Johan Zoffany, which shows her seated next to a vase brimming with blooms. 'Her pleasure in fresh flowers,' wrote Mrs Philip Lybbee Powys in 1767 after a visit to the Queen's Apartments at Buckingham House, ''tho' but in March, every room was full of roses, carnations, hyacainths &c.' (Lybbe Powys, 1899, p. 116, quoted in the exhibition catalogue, George III and Queen Charlotte )   Another intimate portrait of Queen Charlotte with her children at play around her, by Johan Zoffany, circa 1765, shows her wearing a sumptuous dress of silk. The artist show his sitter's dressing table as furnished with another silver-gilt toilet service, the one made in Augsburg which she had brought with her from her home in Germany. Compare the various pieces of Queen Charlotte's Heming toilet service with those in an earlier example which the same goldsmith supplied in 1768/69 to Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 4^th Bt, as a gift to his future wife, Lady Henrietta Somerset. This group, shown in the exhibition Rococo, Art and Design in Hogarth's England (G 50), includes a pair of perfume bottles which appear to be almost identical to the present examples. The catalogue entry  mentions another contemporaneous silver-gilt toilet service, which George III purchased from Thomas Heming as a gift for his sister, Caroline Mathilda, Queen of Denmark. Thomas Heming's 'Third mark, with crown above [present on these bottles], also unrecorded, presumably not adopted until his appointment as Principal Goldsmith to the King in 1760 . . . Some of his earlier surviving pieces in the Royal Collection show a French delicacy of taste and refinement of execution which is unquestionably inherited from his master [Peter] Archambo.' (Grimwade, p. 543) Provenance: Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) wife of King George III. Probably Christie's, London, part of lot 65, 19 May 1819, anonymous sale known to be that of Queen Charlotte's effects   Literature J. Roberts, George III and Queen Charlotte, London, 2004, p. 26-34, 319-336, nos. 383-384. No. 383, Toilet box with the cipher of Queen Charlotte, Thomas Heming, London, 1771-2, and No. 384, Toilet tray with the cipher of Queen Charlotte, 1771-2. Associated literature Rococo, Art and Design in Hogarth's England, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 16 May – 30 September 1984