Lomonosov Cobalt Net Teacup

The Cobalt Net teacup is a wide, shallow cup of hard-paste porcelain on a low foot, its body gently lobed like the petals of the flower that gives the shape its name, Tulip. Over the white ground runs a lattice of fine cobalt-blue lines crossing on the diagonal, each crossing marked by a small blue drop, with tiny gilded stars set between them. The rim is edged in gold, a narrow gilded border runs inside the lip, and the loop handle is solid cobalt. It stands on a matching saucer.

The shape was drawn by Serafima Yakovleva at the Lomonosov factory in Leningrad, and the decoration by Anna Yatskevich, who had stayed at the factory through the siege. In 1944, as the city came back to life and the factory approached its two hundredth year, she worked out the net by hand with a brush. Her model was the first Russian porcelain service, made for the Empress Elizabeth in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Writers have read wartime Leningrad in the pattern: the paper crosses taped over windows against blast, or searchlight beams crossing the night sky. Yatskevich died in 1952. Six years later the Tulip tea service with her net won a gold medal at the Brussels World's Fair, and the pattern became the factory's emblem, spreading over the decades to more than a hundred other shapes.

The factory itself has changed name more than its cup. Lomonosov porcelain was privatised in 1993, briefly returned to state hands in 1999, sold in 2002, and in 2005 took back its old title, the Imperial Porcelain Factory. Through all of it the teacup on the Tulip shape stayed in production. Some later pieces carried the net as a printed transfer; the factory now describes its teacup as painted by hand under and over the glaze, and sells it from the same works on the Neva.