Jeanne Reed’s Two-Tier Bough Pot with Flower Frogs — Hand-Painted French Faïence-Style Harbor Scene, c. 1990s

Jeanne Reed's, Ltd has been quietly outfitting traditional American interiors from a workshop in Williamsburg, Virginia, since 1980 — a wholesale-to-the-trade decorative accessories house whose pieces have circulated for decades through licensed reproductions for the Historic Charleston Foundation and the Preservation Society of Newport County. The brand's catalog leans toward what you'd expect from a Williamsburg house: porcelain urns, painted cachepots, colonial-style lamps, table accessories drawn from the American period rooms collectors love. What you don't see often, in their output or anywhere else, is a piece like this one. This is a two-tier bough pot — a form that traces back to 18th-century English and Continental tabletop tradition. Bough pots were the dressy cousins of the everyday flower brick: rectangular ceramic vessels designed to hold cut stems through a pierced ceramic insert, originally placed on dining tables and mantels to bring fresh garden flowers into formal rooms. What makes this particular example unusual is the stepped, two-level construction. Rather than a single shallow compartment, the body is built as two stacked tiers — a deeper lower well and a shallower upper one — each fitted with its own pierced ceramic frog (five holes apiece, both inserts present and intact). The result lets you arrange short stems at one height and longer stems behind them at another, building a small architectural bouquet without needing floral foam. The decoration is the heart of it. All four sides carry a continuous hand-painted scene in the spirit of 18th-century French faïence — the kind of polychrome work associated with Rouen, Strasbourg, and Vieux Paris. A coastal harbor unfolds across the front: tall-masted sailing vessels with cream sails moving over still blue water, a tiny figure rowing a boat in the middle distance, two figures on a small jetty, distant mountains rendered in soft mauve, and shoreline cottages tucked among trees on either end. The brushwork is clearly painted by hand, not transferred — you can see the variation in each sail, each mountain ridge, each painted figure. A scalloped soft-cobalt brushed border runs along the upper rim. Inside the walls and along the back panel, a delicate rose-pink swag-and-garland chain in a Marie-Antoinette neoclassical style traces the entire interior. At the base, a pink lattice-and-dot trellis border circles the bottom edge, and four sculpted acanthus-leaf corner feet in soft green raise the piece off the surface. The maker mark is the standard Jeanne Reed's signature — a black-ink cursive "Jeanne Reed's" on the underside, paired with an intact gold foil oval "Made in China" label. The stamp style and the surviving foil are consistent with the brand's 1990s production. Manufactured in China to Jeanne Reed's specifications, finished to the brand's quality standards, and now uncommon enough on the secondary market that we couldn't turn up an exact match for this two-tier scenic form anywhere — most Jeanne Reed's pieces in circulation are figurines, single vases, and floral cachepots. This one is a more substantial undertaking, both in form and in decoration.

Details

• Maker: Jeanne Reed's, Ltd — Williamsburg, Virginia (founded 1980)
• Mark: Black-ink "Jeanne Reed's" cursive backstamp; gold foil "Made in China" oval label, intact
• Era: Circa 1990s
• Form: Two-tier (stepped) rectangular bough pot with scalloped wavy rim on all four sides; sculpted acanthus-leaf corner feet
• Inserts: Two original pierced ceramic flower frogs (five holes each), both present and undamaged, sitting on internal shelf supports at two different heights
• Decoration: All-around hand-painted coastal harbor scene with sailing vessels, figures, mountains, and cottages; pink swag-and-garland neoclassical border at the rim and inside walls; rose lattice-and-dot trellis border at the base; soft cobalt brushed rim line
• Material: Glazed ceramic / porcelain

Condition

Excellent. The glaze is bright and clean throughout, with no chips, no cracks, no visible crazing, and no fading to the painted decoration. Both pierced flower frog inserts are present, intact, and seat cleanly on their interior supports. The acanthus-leaf corner feet show no damage. A small kiln spot is visible on the underside base — a minor production characteristic, not a flaw, and not visible in display.