Chocolate cup and saucer

During the eighteenth century the massive importation of exotic goods, through the East India Companies, stimulated the birth of new fashions and habits in European circles. New styles of pottery related to the consumption of hot drinks from distant worlds became established: coffee, tea, chocolate. The cup here, decorated “a chinoiserie” was used for the consumption of chocolate. This drink, imported from the New World at the end of the sixteenth century, enjoyed great success during the eighteenth century, becoming the privileged drink of the aristocratic class, as opposed to coffee, a more bourgeois ritual.