Once the recipe for the production of porcelain had been discovered in Germany in 1708, potteries in Europe began to manufacture tea wares like those previously purchased from China and Japan. This fourth article about the Chitra Collection discusses how the porcelain industry developed in Europe; some of the techniques, styles, and decorations employed by the various ceramic manufacturers; and what we can learn about tea drinking in Europe at that time.
Europeans became aware of Chinese porcelain long before they showed any interest in Chinese tea. The first pieces arrived through Venice and other Italian ports in the 15th century. In the early 16th century, during the Ming Dynasty, the Portuguese started importing blue-and-white porcelain wares. As demand grew, Chinese potters began making items specifically for export to their European customers. In 1602 and 1604, the Dutch captured two Portuguese ships carrying thousands of pieces of porcelain, which were sold at auction in Holland and generated a growing interest amongst the wealthy.
Chinese porcelain was extremely expensive, and so European potters, not having the ability at that time to analyze it scientifically, attempted by trial and error to replicate it. The most successful recipe for “artificial” or “soft-paste porcelain” included clay and ground glass, and sometimes soapstone and lime, a mixture that held together quite well but often collapsed in the kiln. Italy was the earliest, in the 15th century, to experiment. Then in 1664, interest moved to Paris, where Claude Reverend applied for a monopoly of porcelain manufacture, and in 1673, Louis Poterat of Rouen in France was granted a privilege to make porcelain. But while European potters continued to make “artificial porcelain,” members of the various European royal families and rich aristocrats went on spending vast sums on their collections of Chinese porcelain.
But then, after much experimentation, the recipe for true hard-paste porcelain was developed at the Saxon factory of Meissen near Dresden in Germany. The alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger, working for Augustus the Strong, monarch of Saxony (who had a passion for all things Chinese), refined a recipe that had been created by mathematician and scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. In 1708, Böttger devised a successful formula using kaolin clay, petuntse (also known as porcelain stone), and ground feldspar, and in 1709, production at the Dresden laboratories began.
Böttger produced a hard red stoneware first, but by 1713, Meissen was making hard-paste white porcelain that could be glazed and painted. Meissen very much tried to keep the recipe secret, but it found its way to Vienna, where production at the Wiener Porzellanmanufaktur began in 1718–19, and then to Venice, where the Vezzi factory was founded in 1720. Other German ceramic works were established in the 1750s. In France, porcelain production was introduced at the Royal Manufactory of Sèvres in 1765–69, although the factory continued to also make soft-paste porcelains until 1810—five different teapot designs were offered. In the United States, potters had also tried to replicate Chinese and Japanese porcelain, but it was not until 1753 that Andrew Duché discovered deposits of the right type of clay in Virginia. The English potter William Cookworthy recorded that Duché “discovered both the petunze and kaolin. It is this latter earth which he says is essential to the success of the manufacture.”
In England, no hard-paste manufacture was made until the 1760s after deposits of kaolin clay were discovered in Cornwall. So, when Daniel Defoe wrote of “Porcelaine” manufacture in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain in 1748, it was artificial porcelain to which he was referring. “The first village we come to is Bow: where a large manufactory of Porcelaine is carried on. They have already made large quantities of Tea-cups, saucers, plates, Dishes. . . .” Was this increase in the production of soft-paste porcelain in England the reason for the more widespread use of milk in tea at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century? Tea bowls made of Chinese hard-paste porcelain were tough and withstood the high temperatures of freshly brewed tea, but European and English soft-paste porcelain bowls cracked more easily when tea was poured into them. A small amount of cold milk poured into the bowl first may have helped avert costly breakages, and the new fashion created a demand for porcelain milk jugs.
By the time Böttger had worked out how to copy Chinese porcelain, members of the various European royal families and their very wealthy courtiers were drinking tea as an expensive luxury beverage. The Portuguese and the Dutch carried tea home in 1610; tea had arrived in Germany at around the same time on East Frisian ships contracted to the Dutch East India Company; by the 1630s, wealthy French families were drinking tea; the Dutch delivered the first tea into London during the 1650s; and Russia learned to love tea in the 1680s. It was, of course, only the very rich who could afford those early deliveries of tea. Even in the parts of Europe where coffee eventually became the most popular beverage, the royal family and the aristocracy enjoyed tea and owned collections of very fine, expensive porcelain tea wares. As tea drinking continued to be fashionable amongst the rich through the 18th century, the importance of exquisite tea wares also grew, for they showed the world just how wealthy and important their owners were and what impeccable taste they had.
By 1710, Meissen was making pieces for the consumption of tea, coffee, and chocolate. As the technology improved, the factory produced services that included six cups and saucers, chocolate cups, a coffee pot, a teapot, a tea caddy, a container for sugar, and a waste bowl. Many of these were decorated and gilded by local artists and goldsmiths in Dresden and presented as royal gifts.
In 1728, records tell us that Augustus the Strong sent a gift of porcelain to Sophie Dorothea, Queen of Prussia and daughter of the King of England: “The following items . . . from his Royal Porcelain warehouse . . . sent by July 18th to Prussia 6 finely enameled little saucers and tea bowls with gold decoration and colorfully painted Japanese figures, with 1 waste-bowl, 1 coffee pot, 1 teapot, 1 sugar box, and 1 tea caddy.” In Italy, the Roman Chronicle Diario Ordinario for May 18th 1743 contains this entry: “Sunday morning the most excellent Signor Cardinal Annibale Albani San Clemente, Protector of the Kingdom of Poland, went to the [Palazzo del] Quirinale to present to The Holiness of Our Lord [Pope Benedict XIV] a most beautiful gift sent here by the Majesty of the King of Poland to his Holiness himself, consisting of three very refined services for chocolate, tea and coffee of the finest Saxon porcelain with gold borders and with the arms of his Beatitude, who received it with pleasure.” And after a visit to England, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, stated in 1784: “Throughout the whole of England the drinking of tea . . . provides the rich with an opportunity to display their magnificence in the matter of tea-pots, cups and so on. . . .”
The new European porcelain manufacturers were strongly influenced by oriental design and decoration. China had, after all, been Europe’s major supplier of both tea and porcelain for more than 100 years, and Japan had become an important source of porcelain wares during the second half of the 17th century when the collapse of the Ming Dynasty had caused the Chinese factories to close. Now, there was so much cross-fertilization of ideas and copying of decorations and designs that it was difficult to know where the original had come from. The Europeans would copy an idea from the Chinese, the Chinese and Japanese copied it from the Europeans, and then the Europeans often copied it back again.
At Meissen, early tea bowls were decorated with scenes of Chinese people in a garden, Chinese nobles with their servants, Japanese-style flowers such as chrysanthemums, and birds sitting on tree branches. In France, Sèvres used similar designs, decorating tea wares with flowers, insects, and people, but also copying ideas from Japanese Kakiemon porcelain. They also added more elaborate Gallic touches of swirling ribbons tied through baskets and around bunches of flowers, cupids with bows and arrows, and festoons of branches bearing bright red berries. English potters were greatly influenced by oriental designs but also by decorations used at Meissen and Sèvres, and often applied images and molded decorations of plants such as Prunus, Camellia sinensis, Acanthus, and bamboo, and designs using brightly colored birds, partridges, tigers, and dragons. In Vienna, where gold and silver had long been preferred at court as the finest material for use at the dining table, it took much longer for porcelain to attract interest amongst the nobility. When it did, porcelain wares commissioned for wealthy families were decorated not in the Chinese or Japanese style, but bearing ornate and heavily gilded classical and mythological images of Greek gods, Greek temples, Italian landscapes, and Austrian palaces and cities.
While in Europe during the second half of the 18th century expensive porcelain tea wares were still mostly in the possession of the rich, the new potteries in Britain were making teapots, cups, and other tea wares for ordinary people. By the middle of the 18th century, tea consumption had increased sixfold, and with the decrease in the tea tax in 1784 from 119 percent to 12.5 percent, more people could afford to buy regular supplies. The output of tea wares from the potteries had to keep pace, and the jobs and revenue they generated were of great importance to the British economy. It was in the government’s interest, therefore, to discourage the importation of foreign porcelains, and import duties were gradually increased. At the beginning of the 18th century, the tax was 12.5 percent on wholesale auction prices on all China and Japan wares; by the early 1790s, that had increased to 50 percent; and by 1799, the tax was almost 109 percent.
In their determination to copy fine Chinese porcelains, the European potteries developed an industry that continues today to produce exquisite table wares. Over the years, tea bowls became tea cups, waste bowls disappeared, matching tea sets and tiered cake stands appeared, while teapots, sugar bowls, and milk jugs stayed very much the same. The Chitra Collection includes some very fine examples of the way the European factories recognized the interest in tea in the 18th and 19th centuries and created pieces that enhanced the pleasure of tea drinking.
A Note About Color
Whereas early European tea wares copied typical Chinese blue on white decorations and used the gentle colors of the famille verte and famille rose styles, new exciting colors came into use at the major European manufactories, particularly as the background for other images. Meissen used strong pink, claret, pea-green, dark blue, sky blue, and primrose or canary yellow as grounds; Sevres introduced yellow in 1745, royal blue in 1749, turquoise in 1752, light and dark green, pink, and violet in 1757, along with their dark blue, also called Mazarin Blue, bleu du roi, or gros bleu, was much admired; in England, apple green became almost uniquely used by the Worcester pottery.
Contributing Editor Jane Pettigrew, an international tea expert, who has written many books on the subject, is recipient of the British Empire Medal. A former tearoom owner, she is a much-sought-after consultant to tea businesses and hotels, a conference speaker, and an award-winning tea educator. Although her travels take her around the globe, she resides in London.
From TeaTime, July/August 2017
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