Givenchy Haute Couture by Alexander McQueen: Fall/Winter (1999)

10 days in Vienna – one photo per day · May 2024

Day three · Post no Bills · Café Jelinek · Vienna

I've been researching a topic just weird and niche enough-- cup plates--that it occurred to me the history, museum, and literature folks on Tumblr might be able to help me with. To date the most definitive research on cup plates was published in 1971. The author was unable to find a single contemporaneous image of cup plates in use. I set out to see if I could find new information now that so much has been digitized, and so far have not been able to improve much on the 1971 work.

The topic: Cup plates. Above is a photograph of a few glass cup plates in my collection, all most likely made circa 1820s-1840s. Cup plates are small saucers about 3-3.5 inches in diameter made of glass or porcelain. Glass cup plates were made in North America while the porcelain ones were mostly made in England for export to America. In informal or private settings or when in a great hurry, people would pour their tea into the saucer to cool quickly before drinking it directly from the saucer. To protect the table, they then set the dripping tea cup on the cup plate. Etiquette manuals railed against the practice of saucer-sipping and the only description I found of people actually using cup plates was in a context where people were in too much hurry to drink their tea more slowly. I found more references to drinking from a saucer (minus cup plate mention) and they, too, often mentioned haste and always implied that this was an impolite custom. Nonetheless, it was common enough that a housekeeping manual from the 1840s showed where the cup plates should be placed on an informal tea table. This seems to have been a uniquely American practice but strangely, only one travel narrative that I found mentions this odd custom (in the context of a frenetic meal on a riverboat). I figured English travelers would've commented on it, which is one reason I concluded it wasn't behavior travelers would have seen frequently because they weren't in as many casual or intimate spaces. You will find a lot of misinformation on the Internet about cup plate use but what I've written here is more accurate.

How can you help? I have been looking for images or printed references to cup plates being used. I've searched the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, various museums that have good digital collections, academic databases for scholarly articles, and archive.org and came up with exactly one image, which is the diagram in the aforementioned housekeeping manual (Beecher), though I found numerous images of people drinking tea from a saucer (minus cup plate). I go to a lot of museums and am constantly looking for contemporaneous images that depict cup plates in use and still haven't seen any.

If you, in the course of your research, work, or hobbies, happen to encounter a 19th Century (or even 18th C though I think they were invented in the 19th, I could be wrong) written or visual reference to cup plates being used would you please share it with me-- a link to the reference or photo/screencap with citation or other documentation (e.g. I saw this at X museum on X date) would be perfect.

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See more of his stuff here.

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DISCLAIMER: This post is intended to be a joke (noun; something said or done to provoke laughter) and is NOT a death threat directed to anyone at all, including any Tumblr staff.

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Leah Gardner