Established in Swansea in 1764, the Cambrian Pottery reached its creative peak under the proprietorship of Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778-1855), who ran the Pottery (with a break between 1817 and 1824) from 1802 to 1836. Lewis Weston Dillwyn was a natural scientist, antiquarian, Member of Parliament, magistrate and landowner whose intellectual interests drove the Cambrian Pottery to become one of the most ambitious and artistically accomplished British potteries of the early 19th century. While the porcelain manufactured in Swansea between 1814 and 1825 justifies its reputation as among the finest of British porcelains, the pottery produced under Dillwyn’s ownership between 1802 and about 1809 was at its best an equally impressive achievement, most particularly that made for sale in the Pottery’s Cambrian Warehouse in London 1806-1808, the context for which this supper service was most likely created.

William Weston Young (1776-1847), cousin of the physician, physicist and Egyptologist Thomas Young, pursued a varied career not only as an entrepreneur, surveyor and botanist but also as an artist. Between 1803 and 1806 he was employed by Lewis Weston Dillwyn as a draughtsman for his scientific publications, but he also worked as a painter at the Cambrian Pottery. His painting on ceramics is distinguished by its precise detailed manner and by the intellectual interests it demonstrates, whether cultural (such as bards and druids) or scientific (such as birds, butterflies and animals).