Mass Production

During the last quarter of the 18th century the centre of the British porcelain industry was in the heartlands of the Staffordshire potteries. The New Hall factory of Shelton was just one of those producing large numbers of tea and coffee services for the rising urban middle classes in hard-paste porcelain, copying the clean shapes of late Georgian silver. Typical helmet-shaped cream jugs (£60-£100) and oval teapots decorated with small gilt or monochrome floral sprigs (£200-£500) can be identified by their pattern number. (more…)

Although the finest complete services are out of reach for most collectors, it is possible to find beautiful single pieces such as teabowls, coffee cups and saucers, teapots, jugs and chocolate beakers at reasonable prices.

Tea, coffee, and chocolate have been firm favourites with the British ever since a ‘drink called by the Chineans tcha’ was introduced in the 1630s, the first coffee house was opened in London in 1650, and chocolate was first advertised for sale as a drink in 1657. The three beverages were to have a profound influence on the ceramics industries of Britain and the rest of Europe. The high cost of tea when it first arrived in Europe was responsible for keeping early wares small, so that such a luxury item would not be wasted. (more…)

Beautiful vessels and plates of porcellana, large and small . . . for one Venetian groat you could actually have three bowls so beautiful that no one would know how to devise them better. . . .’ So wrote the young Venetian Marco Polo about the yingqing (`misty blue‘) porcelain he saw on his journeys through China in about 1271-5.

Until this time, China was virtually unknown to Europeans except as `Seres’, the land of silk, although as early as the Tang dynasty of AD 618-906, jewels, horses, medicines, wild animals and literature were flowing into the country from India, Arabia and Japan. (more…)

These are the names used for stylistically distinct types of European pottery that are all covered in an opaque glaze made white by ashes of tin.

Right colours are lost if they are painted onto earthenware with a clear lead glaze — the earliest type widely used—since the glaze deepens the underlying clay colour. However, a primary coat of white or cream tin glaze creates a pristine surface on which other colours stand out brilliantly. (more…)

Japanese Wares

Very little Japanese blue and white porcelain was imported into Europe; the few imports were copies of kraak dishes. These can be distinguished from their Chinese counterparts by heavier potting, the finely bubbled glaze and the presence of `spur’ marks on the base. They fetch £1500-£5000 - more than the Chinese originals. Small dishes, teabowls and saucers made for the Dutch market, and influenced by Delft ware, fetch £300-£ 1 000. (more…)

Unexpected finds of early Chinese porcelain do still occur — when a lamp base, for example, or a dog’s bowl turns out to be a valuable early Ming piece. But there is also plenty of later blue and white to attract the collector.

The origins of underglaze-blue decoration are debatable, but certainly it was in use in China by the second quarter of the 14th century. Cobalt oxide, a black pigment which turns blue on firing, had been imported from Persia in Tang times (AD 618-906) and used to colour glazes. But it was the idea of painting it onto a white porcelain body before glazing and final firing that produced the blue and white style of decoration that is still in wide use today. (more…)

During the later Georgian period, it became fashionable to finish a meal with a dessert course — consisting of pies, ices, tarts, fruits, nuts, syllabubs and custards — in place of the earlier ‘banquets’ of spiced sweetmeats and biscuits. Dessert was laid out at a separate table or on a three-tier dumb waiter.

Dessert wares were part of Chinese export dinner services from the 1760s onwards, and included sauce tureens and covers, pierced baskets, low, circular, oval or boat-shaped fruit stands (or tazzas) and dessert plates, which are a little smaller than dinner plates. But since dessert was served^-cold, wares did not need to be heat-resistant to be suitable, and as a result, British soft-paste porcelain was able to compete with imported Chinese and continental dessert services. (more…)

Drinking glasses from the 18th and 19th centuries are enormously varied and survive in surprisingly large numbers, making them affordable and attractive items for collectors.

At the end of the 2nd century BC the Romans were making cups and beakers in pale green or blue-tinted glass in large numbers. Glass was a material of everyday use in a way that was not to be seen after the fall of Rome until the l9th century. (more…)

The diamond-like brilliance of cut crystal glass exudes wealth and even opulence. While it is still costly new, there are antique bargains to be had.

The London GAZETTE of October I, 1709, noted the arrival of a set of German cut and carved glasses, the like of which had ‘not been exposed to public sale before’. The newly developed lead glass was ideally suited to this technique, and within 20 years several London manufacturers were producing a variety of cut-glass cruets, casters, salts, punchbowls and dishes. (more…)

Glass perches, delft racks, whatnots and canterburies are just a few of the strangely named solutions to our ancestors’ storage and display needs.

Chaucer, in the Miller’s table, written in the 14th century, refers to ‘shelves couched at his beddes head’ — probably for books — but shelving for more general uses was rare before the 16th century. By the 19th century, however, a whole variety of other storage and display solutions had appeared. (more…)