The initials “LB” identify Lawrence Birks as the decorator of this vase, made at Minton’s factory. Birks was apprenticed to the French artist Louis Marc Emmanuel Solon who had left Sèvres to join its English rival Minton’s during the political upheavals of the Second Empire. Birks learned his French master’s high-fired pâte-sur-pâte technique, creating a complex relief design by brushing layers of slip (liquid clay) onto an unfired, unglazed body to achieve a three-dimensional translucent effect. The art critic Philippe Burty praised the technique in The British Trade Journal (March, 1878), noting that it afforded “wonderous facilities for the representation of clouds or diaphanous draperies” that appear “arial and floating, and half drowned in a fluid mass.”