He Drank from This Cup
A TazzArte tribute to America at 250 — July 4, 2026
In the autumn of 1786, a wooden crate made its way by sea from New York Harbor to the port of Norfolk, and then up the winding brown length of the Potomac River to a landing below a white mansion on a hill. The crate held 302 pieces of porcelain, each one painted with the allegorical figure of Fame — winged, crowned, trumpet in hand — presenting the eagle badge of the Society of the Cincinnati suspended from a pale-blue ribbon.
George Washington was waiting.
He had been told about the service some months earlier in a letter from Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a fellow member of the Society then serving as a delegate to the Continental Congress in New York. Lee wrote that a dinner and tea service of 302 pieces could be acquired for approximately $150, and that the presence of the Society insignia made it “doubly valuable & handsome.” Washington agreed. He paid. He waited.
On October 31, 1786 — three years after the Treaty of Paris, two years before the Constitution, five years before the Bill of Rights — the china arrived at Mount Vernon. Washington noted, with characteristic restraint, that it had made the journey “without much damage.”
The Long Road from Canton
The story of the porcelain begins two years earlier, in 1784, in a workshop in Canton, China — a city that had been producing export ceramics for Western markets since the sixteenth century and knew precisely what foreign clients wanted: fine white porcelain, blue borders, and whatever emblems of power and sentiment the client specified.
The emblems, in this case, were American. Samuel Shaw — a Continental Army captain, an original member of the Society of the Cincinnati, and soon to become the first United States Consul to China — carried to Canton a watercolor design of the Society’s eagle badge. That badge had been designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French-born engineer who would later give Washington, D.C. its very form. L’Enfant had created the Society’s eagle medallion — the insignia its officers wore around their necks — and it was this eagle that Shaw commissioned the Canton workshops to reproduce in polychrome enamel on porcelain. The Chinese painters set it into an allegorical scene of their own composition: the winged figure of Fame, trumpet raised, presenting the eagle to the world.
Many curators and collectors today consider the resulting service to be the most significant group of antique porcelain in existence. Not because of its material value — though that is considerable — but because of what it represents: the first great luxury commission of the new American republic, placed in China by a veteran of Valley Forge, bearing the design of the man who would build the nation’s capital, acquired by the man who had commanded its army.
The Cup
Among the 302 pieces are several coffee cups. One of them stands 2½ inches tall — six and a half centimeters — with no handle: you wrap both hands around it, or hold it by the rim. On its white porcelain body, Fame blows her trumpet while the Cincinnati eagle stands below her, blue ribbon looped at its neck. A dotted blue-and-gold border runs around the rim.
This cup is now in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Accession number 39.18.3. Donated in 1939 by R. Thornton Wilson, a descendant of one of the original owners. It came from the Washington service. It is the real thing.
He Drank from a Cup Like This
Here is what we know: George Washington drank coffee. His household accounts document it. His guests — foreign diplomats, fellow officers, members of the new government — were served at table using the Cincinnati service, in New York, in Philadelphia, at Mount Vernon.
The service included several coffee cups. Washington used them. Which one he held on any given morning — that, history does not record. But the cup now in the American Wing is one of those cups. The same service. The same glaze. The same painted Fame with her trumpet, the same eagle beneath her.
One of them touched his lips. This may well have been the one.
That is not a small thing. That is a fact precise enough to produce a kind of vertigo: you are looking at an object that a man held while he was building a country, in the years when no one yet knew whether it would hold together.
America at 250
On July 4, 2026, the United States of America marks two hundred and fifty years since fifty-six men signed their names in Philadelphia and declared, against all probability, that a new nation had come into being.
America250 — the official commemoration established by Congress in 2016, supported by former Presidents and First Ladies of both parties — calls this moment a chance to “pause and reflect on our nation’s past, honor the contributions of all Americans, and look ahead toward the future we want to create.” It is a rare thing: a moment when a country stops to consider itself.
TazzArte is a small Swiss studio. We make things to hold — cups, objects that begin the morning. We are not Americans. But we have watched, from across the Atlantic, what America has meant: to the world, to the idea of democracy, to the long and unfinished project of self-governance. Switzerland is its own republic, founded on its own principles. We understand the weight of a founding.
We offer this cup as a tribute. Our gift to America at 250.
The Re-Edition
The TazzArte George Washington’s Coffee Cup is a faithful re-edition of the original in the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the same form, the same decoration, the same weight in the hand. Fine porcelain, ten ounces. Made to be used, not displayed.
Pick it up. Feel it. This is what Washington held.
Two hundred and fifty years is a long time. A cup is a short distance.
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Historical sources: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 39.18.3 (public domain image). Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, “Chinese Porcelain.” The American Revolution Institute, “Society of the Cincinnati Porcelain.” America250.org.