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…)

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…)

For some years now prices have been steadily rising for a kind of ware which many of its buyers often do not realise is glass at all.

Perhaps most people will recognise it when I say that there are vases and boxes in a very characteristic sort of pale blue, with designs which appear to have been pressed from moulds. This blue is quite unmistakable, and although at one time one had to hunt for these pieces, nowadays they are very carefully brought out for your inspection and arranged in sets. (more…)

Talking about drinking out of saucers reminds me that just occasionally you come across small flat oval or oblong dishes: these are spoon trays, used for holding the spoon while you went through that operation. They are usually very expensive, so unless you have a great stroke of luck you may have to reserve this piece for later on, when you sell some of your duplicates.

Also very pricey nowadays are the large handsome jugs, either cylindrical or barrel shaped, some of them decorated with reliefs and perhaps with a mask. Here you may have to put up with a chipped or cracked specimen. I would not worry a bit about that provided it is cheap enough : you will be surprised how little it notices when you have got it in that cabinet. But do not expect it to appreciate in value. (more…)

Here is where we collect fine eighteenth-century china in the traditional way—but with a difference. Instead of ranging over the whole field—and bumping up against the big collectors—we select one small,relatively unconsidered part of it. It will give us specimens of the work of all the famous factories of the era and if we are patient and careful there is no reason why we should not build up a very attractive collection on twenty-five pounds a year—ten shillings a week.

What I am inviting you to consider is old English blue and white “soft-paste” porcelain. First of all, what is it? You must have seen in the shops a great many pieces of tea and table wares decorated in blue. When you examine it closely you find it is not at all like the hard, brilliant porcelains of, say Sevres or Dresden, or even the heavy white bone chinas of Minton or Spode. (more…)

If you have anything like a Regency setting—say an arched alcove—you could scarcely have a better setting for a collection of jasper ware.

In case you find the term unfamiliar, this is what a good many people know simply by the name “Wedgwood.” To them it means all those vases, bowls, plaques, trays, boxes and so on in the famous “Wedgwood” blue, also lilac, sage green and other colours, decorated with white reliefs of classical figures. If you are going to collect it, however, it is worth knowing that many other potters besides Wedgwoods made it and also that other types of pottery and china were made by Wedgwoods. So it only seems reasonable to describe it by the name that Josiah Wedgwood himself used for it, after the jasper stone. (more…)

After boxes and caskets, let’s look at bottles. Bottles for scent and smelling salts, pomades and creams, for snuff, medicine, wine, beer, spirits, acids—in other words for everything that needs a stopper rather than a lid. Like boxes, they come in every sort of material, from porcelain to silver, from gold to stoneware.

I believe that one of these days collectors will wake up to the fact that the last hundred years has been the making of more collectable bottles than at any other period of history. Glassmakers, metalworkers, potters, and now plastic manufacturers, have been designing and making bottles, not only as lovely works of art and craftsmanship, but as mass production items which nevertheless are examples of excellent and interesting design. The astute collector will therefore look not only at the exquisite things of the past with which we start our brief review of bottles, but also at what has been made in the last century by the factories. Much of this is now beginning to take on that interesting look of the once commonplace thing which no longer does its original job, and which has acquired a new strangeness, even beauty, in our eyes. (more…)