III
ENGLISH
DELFT
CHAPTER III
ENGLISH DELFT
What is Delft?—Its foreign origin—Introduction into England—Lambeth Delft—Bristol Delft—Liverpool Delft—Delft Tiles printed at Liverpool by Sadler and Green—Wincanton (Somerset)—Prices of English Delft
Delft, of all earthenware, is, so to speak, the most earthen, and presents an object lesson to the student. It accurately conforms to the technical definition as to what constitutes the difference between earthenware and porcelain. It consists of a porous body (in the case of Dutch delft very porous, as we shall see later), covered by a thick coating of white, opaque enamel.
The porous nature of its body makes it light in weight, and the tin enamel which covers the brown body enables the potter to paint upon this white surface designs, usually in blue. This decoration is over the enamel, if it were under this opaque enamel, that is, on the brown underneath body of the ware, the coating of this white enamel would obliterate the designs. After a piece has been fired to the biscuit state and dipped in white enamel and painted upon when dry, it is, to preserve the painting, fired a second time, when it receives a thin surface of transparent lead glaze.
Its Foreign Origin.—Its name is derived from the town of Delft in Holland. It was about the year 1602 that Dutch potters invented this class of ware in their attempts, in common with all the other European potters, to produce some ware as decorative as the porcelain which had been brought to Europe long before by the Portuguese traders, and now was being largely imported by the East India Dutch merchants.