The brothers Elers are supposed to have come from Amsterdam in the train of the Prince of Orange. Jewitt has studied their pedigree and says they were originally of a noble family of Saxony—their father an ambassador, their grandfather an admiral! However that may be, the first notice we have of them is in a note in the Philosophical Transactions of 1693 by Dr Martin Lister. He says: “I have this to add, that this clay Haematites, is as good, if not better, than that which is brought from the East Indies. Witness the teapots now to be sold at the potters in the Poultry in Cheapside, which not only for art, but for beautiful colour too, are far beyond any we have from China; these are made from the English Haematites in Staffordshire, as I take it, by two Dutchmen incomparable artists.”[16] We too may call them incomparable artists if we compare this evidence with Plot’s account of fifteen years before, or their teapots sold at a guinea a time,[17] with the almost barbaric puzzle-jars of the native potter. It has hitherto been assumed from this statement of Dr Lister’s that the Elers were _in_ Staffordshire in 1693. It does not follow from the extract that the teapots were made in Staffordshire, only that the clay came from thence. In the same year, 1693, they were sued by Dwight of Fulham for copying his red teapots, and in the suit they are described as “of Fulham.” Moreover Dr Martin Lister, writing again in 1698 in his “Account of a Journey to Paris in the Year 1698,” says, after speaking of the porcelain made at St Cloud, “As for the red ware of China, that has been and is done in England.... But we are in this particular beholden to two Dutchmen who wrought in Staffordshire, as I have been told, and were not long since in Hammersmith.”[18] This, it will be seen, confirms the supposition that they first made their teapots and stoneware in Fulham or Hammersmith. The important Chancery Suit, discovered by Prof. Church, in which Dwight sued his copyists at Fulham, Nottingham and Burslem is as follows: