Plate from the Society of the Cincinnati Service of George Washington

One plate from the 302-piece Chinese export service that Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee bought for George Washington in 1786, painted with the Fitzhugh border and the winged figure of Fame holding the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati, the hereditary officers' society that Jefferson, Franklin and Aedanus Burke had spent the previous three years attacking as the seed of an American nobility. Washington commissioned it as the Society's own first president, two years after he had personally forced the hereditary clause out of its charter under threat of resignation, and used it at Mount Vernon and in his presidential households.

The service descended through Martha Washington's family to Arlington House, was seized with the rest of the Custis-Lee property when the Civil War began, spent forty years on federal museum display, and was released back to the family only in 1901. It has been scattered ever since among at least seven public collections, and the pattern's fame has made it one of the most reproduced and one of the most forged classes of American-market export porcelain there is. This plate's own route from that dispersal into the Metropolitan Museum in 1917 is not documented in the sources consulted; it enters this record only at the point the Museum's own accession begins.

What it is

A circular hard-paste porcelain plate, 24.1 centimetres across, painted in the underglaze-blue Fitzhugh border pattern already common on Chinese export porcelain made for the American market in the 1780s: a spearhead rim enclosing four flower-filled reserves separated by ornamental panels of butterflies and foliage. At the centre, in overglaze enamel and gilding, stands a winged female figure in a green robe, blowing a horn, holding out an oval badge slung from a blue ribbon on which an eagle is displayed. That badge is the insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati, and the plate is one surviving piece of the dinner and tea service George Washington bought bearing it.

The Metropolitan Museum catalogues the piece simply as "Plate," Chinese, for the American market, dated about 1785, and holds it in the American Wing under accession number 17.73 (object 5977), acquired with the Rogers Fund in 1917. Its own catalogue tags the object under the heading "Eagles and Angels," which is as good a plain description of the decoration as any.

A badge simplified in the making

The insignia itself was not the Society's founders' first idea rendered whole. Major Pierre L'Enfant, the French engineer-officer who later laid out Washington City, designed the Society's eagle device and had it approved on 10 June 1783, within a month of the Society's founding. Samuel Shaw, a Massachusetts artillery officer and an original member of the Society, carried L'Enfant's watercolour drawings with him to China in 1784 with instructions considerably more ambitious than what reached the plate: Shaw wanted, in his own words, "the American Cincinnatus, under the conduct of Minerva, regarding Fame" receiving the emblems of America from the hand of Minerva and proclaiming them to the world.

The Chinese enameller working from Shaw's sketch could not, or did not, execute that programme. What survives on this plate and its companions is a reduction of it: Fame alone, in a green robe, blowing her horn and displaying the eagle badge on its ribbon. The simplification is itself evidence of how a Western commission actually crossed into a Chinese workshop in this period, as a drawing handed to a supercargo and reinterpreted by a painter who had never seen Minerva, Cincinnatus or the scene Shaw had in his head.

How a design reached Canton

Shaw sailed from New York on 22 February 1784 as supercargo, the officer responsible for a ship's cargo and trade, aboard the Empress of China, the first American vessel to trade directly with China. The ship reached Canton on 30 August 1784, joining British, Dutch, French and Danish traders already operating there under the Canton System, the arrangement by which the Qing state confined all Western trade to a handful of licensed Chinese merchant houses at the single port of Canton and forbade direct dealings with Chinese officials. It was, Shaw recorded, the first time the Chinese had had occasion to distinguish Americans from Englishmen at all.

The ship left Canton on 27 December 1784 and reached New York again on 11 May 1785 with a cargo of tea and cloth. It was on this voyage, or the one immediately following it, that Shaw placed the porcelain order carrying L'Enfant's design; the plate pattern itself is dated by the Society's own museum to production in Jingdezhen about 1784-85, meaning the finished ware reached the American market within roughly a year of the drawing leaving New York, itself a fast turnaround for a design that had to travel from a New York meeting hall to a Chinese workshop and back as a finished object, dependent on the season's single trading window and the several months each way of ocean passage. Shaw returned to China in 1786 as the first United States consul at Canton, formalising a relationship he had begun as a private trader.

Henry Lee's commission for Washington

The full 302-piece dinner and tea service that included this plate was not Shaw's personal gift to Washington but a purchase Washington made through an intermediary. Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, the cavalry officer and future governor of Virginia, wrote to Washington that a service in the pattern could be had for about $150, made, in Lee's words, doubly valuable and handsome by the presence of the Society's insignia. Washington instructed Lee to complete the purchase, which was transacted through the New York firm of Constable, Rucker & Co. Sources consulted here differ by a month on exactly when: the Society's own account places Washington's purchase in July 1786, with the service reaching Mount Vernon by 31 October 1786; the State Department's account of a companion plate places Lee's New York purchase in August 1786 and Washington's receipt of it in September. Both agree on the year and the price, and on Lee as the negotiating agent; the exact month has not been reconciled here.

At $150 for 302 pieces bearing the emblem of a society already at the centre of a fierce national argument about aristocracy, the price is strikingly low against the china's later reputation, though no period wage or cost comparison that would give that figure real weight in the sources consulted here has been found, and none is asserted.

A society born controversial

The Society of the Cincinnati was founded on 13 May 1783 at a dinner of Continental Army officers at the Verplanck house in Fishkill, New York, conceived by Henry Knox, presided over by Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, with Alexander Hamilton as orator. Its stated purposes were to preserve the wartime fellowship of the officer corps, maintain a charitable fund for indigent members and their families, and press the unresolved question of the officers' promised pensions. Its charter also provided that membership would descend to each officer's eldest male heir in perpetuity, and it named George Washington its first president general in December 1783, an office he held until his death in 1799.

The hereditary clause provoked an immediate and serious backlash. In October 1783 Aedanus Burke, a South Carolina judge, published Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati under the pseudonym Cassius, arguing that the Society would create, in his phrase, a race of hereditary patricians or nobility that would in time subvert the republic. The pamphlet was reprinted across American and European cities and provoked a wave of published replies on both sides. Benjamin Franklin, writing a private letter to his daughter Sarah Bache in January 1784 that he never sent to America or authorised for publication there, wondered how a number of private persons should think proper to distinguish themselves and their posterity by "an Order of hereditary Knights, in direct Opposition to the solemnly declared Sense of their Country," and mocked the Society's eagle badge as looking more like a turkey, adding that the turkey was, in truth, the more respectable bird of the two. Thomas Jefferson, writing to Washington on 16 April 1784 in answer to Washington's own request for a frank opinion, warned that a hereditary order's honours might one day "draw into the order all the men of talents, of office and wealth" and that hereditary branches of government were, by experience, "the patrons of privilege and prerogative"; Jefferson told Washington plainly that he wished to see him "standing on ground separated from" the Society, so that the character history would hand down from the Revolution would in no way be compromised. In France, the Comte de Mirabeau published his own pamphlet, Considerations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus, in 1784-85, extending Burke's argument to hereditary honour of every kind and printing, as an appendix, Washington's own circular letter to the state societies.

The reform that did not hold

Washington took the criticism seriously enough to draft his own "Observations on the Institution of the Society of Cincinnati" ahead of the Society's first general meeting, held in Philadelphia in May 1784, in which he weighed proposals running as far as dissolving the Society outright. He arrived at the meeting, by one account, prepared to press for abolition, and backed away from that only once L'Enfant brought word that the French crown had approved a French chapter of the order. What Washington did press through, under an implicit threat that he would resign the presidency general otherwise, was a revised charter, called the Institution, that dropped hereditary succession, dropped honorary memberships, and carried an informal understanding that members would not wear the eagle badge in public.

The revised Institution was sent to the state societies for ratification. Most approved it. New York, New Hampshire and Delaware refused. And once the public controversy had cooled, the general society quietly reverted to the original, hereditary Institution of 1783, which has remained the basis of membership ever since; only the French chapter, which had abolished heredity under royal sanction, never restored it before the monarchy that had licensed it collapsed. The reform that made headlines in 1784, in other words, did not survive the decade that produced it.

The china Washington ordered anyway

Washington's own china is worth reading against that sequence rather than apart from it. He asked Jefferson's frank opinion of the Society in April 1784, drafted his own paper proposing its reform that May, and by his own later account regarded the hereditary clause as genuinely dangerous to the republic he had just helped create. Two years later, in 1786, with the hereditary Institution already sliding back into force behind the scenes, he instructed Lee to complete the purchase of a 302-piece service bearing the Society's eagle in the hand of Fame, and used it prominently at Mount Vernon and in the presidential households in New York and Philadelphia during his own administration. The same man who told Jefferson he wanted distance from the Society's hereditary ambitions ate from porcelain broadcasting its badge at his own table for the rest of his life. Nothing in the sources consulted here suggests Washington saw a contradiction in this, and this record does not supply one for him; it states the sequence and leaves the reader to weigh it.

From Mount Vernon to Arlington House

After Washington's death the service remained in the family. Martha Washington passed it to her grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who displayed the Washington relics, including the Cincinnati china, at Arlington House, the mansion he built across the Potomac from the new federal city and treated as something close to a shrine to his adoptive grandfather. Custis died in 1857, leaving Arlington and its contents to his only child, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, who was married to Robert E. Lee, with the estate to pass on her death to their eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee.

The Lees left Arlington in 1861 as the Civil War began, and Union forces occupied the property for the duration of the war.

Two confiscations, not one

What happened next split into two separate legal tracks that are easy to conflate and worth keeping apart. The real estate itself was confiscated under wartime tax law: Congress had authorised the assessment of property taxes in "insurrectionary districts," the Arlington estate was assessed $92.07 in 1862, commissioners refused Mary Custis Lee's attempt to pay it by proxy while she was unable to cross Union lines in person, and the property was sold at auction on 11 January 1864, with the federal government itself the sole bidder at $26,800, below its own assessed value of $34,100. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered part of the grounds turned into a military cemetery that same year, a decision his own account and later historians have read as at least partly a deliberate act of retribution against Lee. The Supreme Court found that sale unconstitutional on 4 December 1882, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Samuel Freeman Miller holding that the in-person payment requirement had denied the Lees due process, and awarded title to George Washington Custis Lee; rather than disturb a cemetery that already held thousands of graves, Congress bought the land back from him for $150,000 on 31 March 1883, with Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln accepting the transfer for the government.

The Washington relics, including the surviving Cincinnati porcelain, were confiscated separately, as personal property taken from the house itself rather than real estate sold for unpaid tax, and were not covered by the 1882-83 land settlement at all. They were held and displayed by the federal government, at the United States Patent Office and later the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum, for roughly forty years, from the early 1860s until 1901.

The 1901 return

The State Department's own catalogue entry for a related plate from this service states plainly that after the Arlington confiscation, President William McKinley ordered the government-held Cincinnati china released to the Custis-Lee family, naming both Mary Custis Lee and Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee as recipients. Wikipedia's account of Mary Custis Lee (Robert E. Lee's daughter, 1835-1918), citing a 2016 University of Delaware dissertation by Hannah Boettcher on the Washington relics' passage through museums between 1901 and 1918, likewise records that the family's heirlooms were "confiscated by the Union Army and restored to the family in 1901."

Beyond that outline, the claim needs more verification than the sources consulted here could supply, and this record says so rather than smoothing it over. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee's widow, had died in 1873, twenty-eight years before 1901, and could not literally have received anything that year; the State Department's naming of her as a 1901 recipient alongside her daughter is almost certainly a compression of the family's decades-long claim into a single sentence rather than a claim that she was alive to receive it. Nor have the sources consulted here yielded an exact date within 1901, the specific department or legal instrument McKinley used to authorise the release, or confirmation of which family member, the daughter Mary Custis Lee or her brother George Washington Custis Lee, who held formal title to Custis's estate under his will, was the recipient of record. What can be said with confidence is that the release happened, that it happened in 1901, that the china was part of it, and that Mary Custis Lee is the family member credited with the inventory and provenance work that let the collection be reconstituted afterward; the mechanism itself belongs among this record's open questions.

Scattering across a nation's museums

Pieces of Washington's service have been dispersing into public collections for more than a century since the 1901 release, and this record can confirm several of them independently rather than repeat an unverified full list. The Society of the Cincinnati's own museum, at Anderson House in Washington and now operated as the American Revolution Institute, holds three dinner plates and a platter from the service. Mount Vernon holds pieces returned, in effect, to Washington's own house. The Cincinnati Art Museum holds at least one platter, photographed on display. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds at least one plate, dated to the same 1784-85 Jingdezhen production. The State Department's Diplomatic Reception Rooms hold a plate, accession RR-1972.0027, which its own catalogue records as purchased from a private owner, a Mrs. Ludwell L. Montague, with acquisition funds donated by H. Richard Dietrich Jr., a rare instance in this object's literature of an actual named seller for a piece of the service. Henry Francis du Pont assembled a group of pieces from Custis-Lee descendants for what became the Winterthur Museum, part of the bequest that founded the collection.

No scholarly reconstruction attempting to total every surviving piece of the original 302 and place all of them has turned up in the sources consulted here, and this record does not claim to offer one; it lists only the holdings independently verified above, and marks the fuller census as an open question rather than guessing at it.

This plate's own path: Rogers Fund, 1917

Where this specific plate stood in that dispersal is, on the evidence available here, simply not documented. The Metropolitan Museum's own accession record begins the object's history with the Rogers Fund purchase of 1917, sixteen years after the family recovered the china from federal custody, and gives no seller's name, no dealer, and no note connecting the piece to the Custis-Lee family, Arlington House, or the 1901 release. It is entirely possible this plate followed that route and simply was not catalogued with the connection noted at the time of purchase; it is equally possible it had already left the main body of the service earlier, whether sold, given away, or separated before the Civil War, since nothing in Washington's or Custis's lifetime bound every piece of a 302-piece dinner and tea service to travel together forever. This record states that gap as a gap rather than bridging it with either story, in keeping with the discipline this publication holds itself to; readers should treat any claim linking accession 17.73 specifically, rather than the service generally, to Arlington House or the 1901 release as unverified until a documented seller or intermediate owner surfaces.

A pattern built to be faked

The fame and rarity of genuine Cincinnati porcelain made it, almost from the moment collectors began paying real money for it, one of the most imitated classes of American-market export ware. Two separate documented episodes make the point. Ceramics in America's 2016 research identified roughly twenty pieces of spurious "Cincinnati" porcelain that surfaced on the antiques market in the mid-1920s and early 1930s, decorated with a nude figure of Fame and an eagle across four different border patterns and bearing invented personal initials on shields, sold to serious collectors, including Henry Francis du Pont himself, who paid $350 for one fake tea caddy in 1925 and $850 for a second in 1927 believing both genuine. The fakes were eventually exposed on stylistic grounds, since an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century American buyer is very unlikely to have commissioned porcelain decorated with an undraped Fame, on physical grounds, since raking light revealed ghosted borders and decoration beneath the added design and the new painting was of visibly inferior quality, and by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, which found zinc, tin oxide opacifier, bismuth in the gilding and chromium in the sepia enamel, none of them consistent with genuine late eighteenth-century Chinese manufacture.

Separately, Winterthur's "Treasures on Trial" study of a Society of the Cincinnati plate used the same nondestructive XRF technique to establish that a genuine eighteenth-century blank had been refired, apparently around 1975, to add spurious Cincinnati decoration and raise its value; the added green enamel contained chromium, a colourant not known to have been used in China before the twentieth century, along with a zinc flux and an anomalously high cobalt concentration, and the plate's reverse showed grey staining consistent with a second firing. Neither episode implicates this specific Metropolitan Museum plate, which has no publicly reported technical examination casting doubt on it and has been in an institutional collection, on and off display, since 1917; but the pattern's own history of forgery is precisely why any single piece's authenticity rests on this kind of physical testing rather than on the emblem alone, and no published XRF or raking-light report specific to accession 17.73 was found in the sources consulted here.

What the emblem asked a Chinese painter, and an American table, to carry

The badge at the centre of this plate was never a private mark. It was the visible sign of an argument still being fought in print on both sides of the Atlantic when the porcelain that carries it was fired: whether men who had led a revolutionary army against inherited privilege were entitled to found an inherited order of their own. Fame, as the figure was originally conceived by Shaw, was meant to proclaim the Society's honours to the world; what a Chinese enameller working from a borrowed drawing actually painted was a simplified emblem stripped of the classical apparatus Shaw had wanted, which is itself a small, documented instance of how an American political symbol was translated, and reduced, by a maker outside the culture that produced its meaning. There is no evidence in the sources consulted here that the porcelain itself was read by contemporaries as making any claim beyond ordinary membership display, of the kind other veterans' and fraternal societies of the period put on their china, silver and prints; the controversy over the Society lived in pamphlets, letters and state legislatures, not, so far as the record here shows, in any argument specifically about the tableware. Recording that absence plainly, rather than inventing a hidden meaning for the plate itself, is the more honest finding.

Condition, marks, and what remains untested

The Museum's own record gives no marks or inscriptions for this piece and no published condition report was found in the sources consulted. The plate has been treated by the Museum as public domain and has supplied its own primary photograph for open licensing, which is how the image accompanying this record became available. Beyond that, this record can state only what is missing: no scientific analysis of this specific plate's enamel or body, of the kind Winterthur and the Chipstone researchers have applied to other pieces of the pattern, appears to have been published, and no conservation history is recorded anywhere in the sources consulted.