After 1763 Sprimont’s factory at Chelsea was only working at irregular intervals. Some time later, about 1768, many of the enamel-painters migrated to Worcester, where capable artists seem to have been in great demand. It is usual to attribute to this migration a new scheme of decoration that came into vogue at Worcester in the seventies. This was the period of the vases with deep blue grounds and panels brilliantly painted with flowers and bright-plumaged tropical birds. The _bleu du roi_ ground (we must remember that, like the similar grounds at Chelsea and Longport, this pigment was painted _sous couverte_) is often covered with the salmon-scales in a deeper tint so characteristic of the period; at other times it is replaced by a _poudré_ blue. The hand of the Chelsea artist is to be recognised in the decoration of the panels, but the vases are generally of simple contours, often octagonal and, on the whole, following Chinese shapes. It is this richly decorated ware, produced especially between 1770 and 1780, which now commands such extravagant prices in the London market. On the other hand, the new classical forms already in favour at Derby and in France were not as yet adopted at Worcester--they came in later, and then in a more debased form. In fact, the special mark of this, the finest period in these works, is the application of a rich style of painting that we generally associate with rococo shapes, to vases which otherwise retain the form and decoration of their Chinese prototypes. Somewhat later, from Sèvres, no doubt, came the canary yellow, generally poor in tone and of uneven strength. The simple floral wreaths of the Louis XVI. period are here represented by the pretty ‘trellis’ design, green festoons hanging from reddish poles (PL. XLVI.). Much of the Worcester porcelain was from an early time decorated in London. In 1768 we find Mr. J. Giles (no doubt the ‘Mr. Gyles of Kentish Town’ to whose kiln Thomas Craft took his famous punch-bowl to be ‘burnt’ at a charge of 3s.) described in an advertisement as ‘china and enamel painter, proprietor of the Worcester Porcelain Warehouse, up one pair of stairs in Cockspur Street.’ Here the nobility and gentry may find ‘articles useful and ornamental curiously painted in the Dresden, Chelsea, and Chinese taste.’ At a later time the Baxter family occupied much the same position as Giles. The elder Baxter had [Illustration: _PLATE XLVI._ WORCESTER]