The impetus for this technological marvel goes back to the global expansionism of Europe’s seafaring nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the exotica brought back by early traders was Chinese porcelain, an impermeable white ceramic ware unlike anything produced in Europe. As trade with the Orient grew, so did importation of Chinese porcelain. By the eighteenth century, Chinese potters were regularly turning out blue-and-white “export porcelain” ([Fig. 3]) made specifically for the European market. East India Company ships were transporting it to England as “flooring” to protect perishable cargoes of tea.
Figure 2. British-made white ironstone or granite china, 1891-1900. All four plates are marked “MADE IN ENGLAND,” a convention adopted in 1891 to comply with American import regulations.
Much of this porcelain found its way to the American colonies. In the early colonial period, Chinese porcelain was a relatively rare and prestigious ware associated with the upper-class custom of afternoon tea. By the time of the American Revolution, both tea-drinking and porcelain had spread to the lower classes. When American merchants opened their own direct trade with China in the 1780s, they brought back large quantities of porcelain along with the more lucrative teas and silks. By the 1820s Chinese blue-and-white had become an ordinary household fixture and, with a concomitant decline in quality of production, began to lose favor with the American buyer. Very little was imported after the early 1830s.
Figure 3. Chinese export porcelain. These fragments are all from plates or serving dishes, probably imported before 1830. All are hand-painted with blue underglaze decoration. The piece on the upper left retains traces of additional decoration, including gilding, applied over the glaze.
Figure 4. French Bourbon Sprig or Cornflower porcelain, a pattern popular before the French Revolution. Other pieces of this pattern are on display in the Middleton House dining room.
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Oriental porcelain on the European ceramic industry. Europeans greatly admired the hardness, whiteness, and thinness of the Chinese imports, and many of the most important developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century ceramic manufacture resulted from a conscious effort to imitate these qualities. Soft paste porcelain, made by adding glass to the clay body, was an early attempt to reproduce the porcelain paste itself. The Germans discovered the secret of true hard paste porcelain around 1710 and began producing it at Meissen three years later, followed by the Austrians at Vienna in 1718 and the French at Sèvres in 1768. Early European porcelains imitated the Oriental in design as well as paste, but after about mid-century, chinoiseries gave way to flowers and other European designs executed in a variety of colors. Through the end of the century, European porcelain remained an art form available only to the well-to-do. [Figure 4] shows a French porcelain tea plate hand-painted in the “Bourbon Sprig” or “Cornflower” pattern of scattered flowers popular during the reign of Louis XVI. Probably produced in Paris in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, this plate was part of a large set of Bourbon Sprig china originally brought from Europe by a member of the Middleton family after 1820.
