Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860 by Krill Rosemary Troy;

Author:Krill, Rosemary Troy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

European Porcelain

While some potters experimented with and succeeded in achieving porcelain’s white appearance, others worked toward duplicating porcelain itself. By 1710, European potters were having some success. After years of experimentation, potters near Dresden (in present-day Germany) successfully produced an impervious white, translucent ceramic body; their success meant that Westerners finally had mastered the intricacies of porcelain production. Some of the names of the European and English potteries are still in use today—Meissen in Germany; Sèvres in France; and Worcester, Derby, and Chelsea in England (see fig. 12-7). A Chinese porcelain plate design of the mid-1700s using a central scroll was an inspiration for a similar plate made at the Bow Porcelain Works in England, perhaps a decade later (see fig. 12-8).

Mutual East-West influences on porcelain were affected by trading patterns. By the early 1800s, the British dominance in the China trade ended. Excise taxes eventually doubled the cost of incoming porcelains between 1779 and 1800, just when independence allowed American merchants to trade with the East on their own. The United States maintained a solid trading position through the first half of the 1800s. Numerous examples of early nineteenth-century Chinese export porcelain with American motifs show this great change in trade.

The fever for Chinese porcelains eventually declined. For most of the eighteenth century, however, the desire for porcelains, copies, and imitations strongly motivated potters and decorators, both in China and Europe, to study each other’s wares for stylistic inspiration. The interaction of East and West was, for centuries, an important influence on the ceramics that were available in the colonies and young United States.

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