The story of chinaEarly man of course made vessels for storing or drinking out of. He used clay and let it dry in the sun to harden. It was rather like flower pots are now - unglazed and porous so it was not very efficient at holding liquids. Then man found out how to glaze pottery - adding a glassy shiny surface which was impervious to liquids.
From the very beginning man has liked to decorate his surroundings and artefacts, and the way he decorated his crockery evolved over time. At first he used three methods.... he painted on a pattern using slip ( sloppy clay thinned with water) of a different colour...clay can of course be yellowish or even black as well as different shades of red and brown; or he rolled little "snakes" or "balls" of clay and placed them in patterns on the surface; or he inpressed patterns using something with a texture to it - pressed a leaf, button, bit of rope or twig into the surface to leave an impression.
As all this decorating was hand done, each piece was individually decorated, and as time went on and the whole process became more sophisticated, a way of mass-producing decorated wares became desirable... In the middle of the eighteenth century at last a method was devised, and it became known as transfer printing.
Transfer printing is done by transferring the design from an engraved copper template on to the fired pottery product, before it is glazed. a colouring medium is rubbed into the engraving, and then a sheet of tissue paper is pressed onto it; this picks up the coloured design, and the tissue is then pressed onto the pottery. The glaze is then added and the object is fired again.... and it is now permanently patterned with an under-glaze design. You will have noticed that most of the old transfer-printed wares are patterned in blue... this is because the only colouring product that was stable at the required high temperature was cobalt, which gives a lovely bright blue. Later other colours were found, and today they use synthetic colours....... cobalt is far too expensive today (most cobalt comes from Zaire... where production is uncertain, and it is used in cancer treatments and space exploration so cannot be spared for decoration.....)
So this was the way pottery and porcelain were decorated in a cheaper, mass produced method, and attractive wares could now be afforded by ordinary people. The most expensive wares were still hand decorated, using enamel colours and gold. Gilding was done using almost pure gold - 22 carat was used on the best, like Spode. And there was a mid price range which had part of their pattern transfer printed, and "colouring-in" done by hand..... Today these methods are still used on special products but most everyday china is decorated using a photographic screen printing technique.
Now I will tell you about my amazing find. In the mid 70s in Harare I saw an auction sale advertised. I had been collecting for a couple of years and had already decided to concentrate on Spode, and had bought the definitive Spode book to add to my growing collection of specialist books.
I went with a friend to the pre-auction viewing, not expecting to see anything of interest - it was a general sale of all sorts of household wares, not an antique sale. But there among all the junk I spied some beautiful cups that I recognised (from illustrations in my book) as Spode. It is not only the pattern but the shape, and the design of the handles...lots of clues. This was a complete set - 12 tea cups, 12 coffee cans as they are called - straight-sided cups - and 12 saucers. In those days (this was made in 1809) the saucers were shared by the tea and coffee sets,so only 12 saucers. And no teapot etc because when they were made they were such an expensive set - heavily gilded and hand painted - that if you could afford to buy them you already had silver teapot etc....
Well of course there were no marks on them and the auctioneer did not have a clue about them, so I rushed home and phoned Paul at work and told him we had to go to the auction sale that night. It was a grim rainy night and I was very lucky to have very little competition in the bidding. I got the set for $140, and wrote to Christies in London with a photo within a week. Well, they valued it at �1000. That was over 20 years ago....
This is the sort of fairytale find that a collector makes once in a lifetime if he is lucky, so I know I am lucky. You will see in the picture how deep the saucer is. This is another clue when you are dating china - up until about 1820 they always had deep saucers because they actually drank out of their saucers!! It was not a low-class or ignorant thing to do, but the accepted way to behave ...
I could tell you a lot more about it but won't bore you with more. Just one little interesting note. I said there were no marks on my set - well there are a few, not official factory marks but the workmens' marks. They were paid by piecework, so each had his own mark (most were illiterate, and the marks are simple arrows, a pattern of three dots, etc)....at the end of the day the supervisor counted up your day's output and you were paid accordingly. I have done some research into these marks and the people who made them. It is a fascinating study. They were paid very little indeed, and until 1870 were paid "good from kiln" which meant if there was an accident along the way - someone dropped the things, or they exploded in the kiln which was quite common - you did not get paid for that work. After 1870 this was changed to "good from hand" which was much better - if you did your bit satisfactorily you were paid even if something happened to it further down the line. It was a real production line with one person doing the green painting, another the red, etc.
One reason this type of ware was so expensive was that each of the colours had to be fired at a different temperature, so the objects went into the kiln for anything up to 10 firings.... and each firing is fraught with danger as things go wrong with kilns, or there is an item which has an air bubble, and explodes, destroying everything in the kiln.....
The chinese had been making beautiful porcelain for thousands of years, while the Europeans were still at the primitive eartheware stage. In fact for drinking vessels and many other purposes pewter was the norm in Europe, and it was not until the trade with the East hotted up , and the revered new beverage, tea, was introduced into Europe in about 1662, that china began to be used for tableware. ( Note that date.... that means that neither Elizabeth I nor William Shakespeare ever had a cup of tea in their lives! Is that not astounding?)
The ships bringing tea from the East also brought lovely porcelain, and the Europeans fell in love with its fineness, it's strength, its subtle colours, the whiteness of the "body" - the clay with which it was made. Tea was a high priced treat - bought by the ounce from the apothecary's shop - and so was this wonderful porcelain, so enterprising fellows already making pottery tried to copy the fine wares, and all over Europe - and England - factories sprang up, each putting out its own version of porcelain or fine china.
First a word about the word porcelain.... it certainly came from the Italian porccelina, meaning little pig. This was because this was the nickname given to the cowrie shell, and the cowrie shell is so silky smooth.... as is porcelain. One story has it that Marco Polo brought the first china back from the east, and devised that name for it.......
Well, the factories were falling over themselves to make porcelain, hampered by the fact that China was not about to let anyone in on the secret! Eventually towards in the early eighteenth century Johann Bottger at the Meissen factory near Dresden in Germany managed to find a combination of clays and firing temperatures that produced china which was both strong and translucent, and even whiter than chinese porcelain. (The main clays used in porcelain production are Kaolin and china-stone - known as petuntse by the chinese.)
It was a long time before the rest of Europe learnt how to make this .....of course the Meissen factory was not telling its secrets either..... Now the scene switches to England, where my interest lies. There were by now - towards the middle of the eighteenth century - many factories trying to produce porcelain, and some failing rather spectacularly! Some of the early efforts were more like opaque glass that china. Some could not stand the temperature in the kiln and became misshapen during firing. Dr Wall of Worcester had the first small breakthrough when he added soapstone to his mix, and produced translucent items....although they had a distinct greenish tinge!
At the same time as all the experimenting was going on, people were going crazy about the porcelain imported from the east, to such an extent the the traditional chinese decoration became all the rage.... and they demanded that the same type of decoration be put on the locally manufactured wares. When local manufacturers ran out of chinese patterns they made up their own "chinese style" patterns, using the themes and stylisations which were common in chinese patterns. This is how the famous Willow Pattern was born......it was no more Chinese than you are!!! It was devised by a potter in England and became so popular that by 1800 there were 200 factories churning out their own version of Willow Pattern. Each factory had slightly different details in the pattern.... 9 apples on the tree - or 10.... 2 people in the boat - or three, leaves of one shape or another on the trees....... some people make it a lifetime task to collect as many different willow patterns as they can!!
All this pseudo-chinese decoration became known as "chinoiserie" and became very fashionable in furnishings, furniture and general decoration for several years.....
I am sure you are familiar with the snobbish argument as to whether it is more ladylike to put the milk in first, or the tea first? This started because the first fine china made in England was so fragile that putting the (hot) tea in first could have cracked the cup..... so this became a way of indicating that you could afford the very best imported porcelain and did not use the cheap, shoddy local stuff!!!
By the middle of the eighteenth century there were several factories producing acceptable china but none was able to be as thinly potted as the chinese body, nor was it so translucent. Translucence is when you hold something up to the light and the light shines through... you cannot see through the object but you can see the shadow of your fingers placed behind it for instance.
The breakthrough came with the invention by my hero, Josiah Spode III, of bone china, which became the English standard fine china, and is produced even today by many countries besides England. As its name suggest, bone is added to the ingredients! Calcined ox bone - heated so fiercely that it turns to ash - makes up about 50% of the body, and the resulting body is able to be thinly potted, and it turns out white, strong and translucent.
You will notice that earthenware chips easily and the chipped edges are granular and crumbly, whereas china does not chip easily, and the body is much more fine-grained. But it is the translucence that really defines it....
I have been told never to buy English china made during the second world war because British bones were used instead of the better Argentinian ones, and the lack of calcium (which the Argentinian animals got from the pampas grass) makes the china of inferior quality....