A pair of painted toleware shop tea canisters:  Each with chinoiserie figures set within a landscape and all on a red ground.

English - 19th-century

29” high overall - 10”diameter at base

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These canisters were used in shops for storage of loose tea. Now highly collected and used today, most frequently, mounted as lamps.  All of them were decorated variously, sometimes merely with numbers and sometimes, as with this pair, with Chinoiserie scenes - representing the origins of tea.  

This pair are, delightfully, in "a country house state" - which is always pleasing to find on the one hand as they exhibit the passage of time and gentle aging and on the other hand, reassuring as one can be most assured that they are actually old.