The pot is strewn with insects and flowers around a vignette of a tree-perched monkey, considered appropriately exotic for the beverage, called 'India Coffee' around the middle of the eighteenth century after the East India Companies that promoted its cultivation. The ornament also reflects the contemporary French fashion encouraged by the publication of ornamental pattern books entitled Livre de Singeries.

A related chased and embossed copper tea-kettle at the Victoria & Albert Museum is illustrated in E. Turner, Brass, 1983, pl. 16. Related pieces have traditionally been thought to be English, although it is possible that they are Dutch as they appear in contemporary Dutch paintings.