Porcelain

A History from the Heart of Europe

Suzanne L. Marchand

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201986
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

"This is the book on porcelain we have been waiting for.... A remarkable achievement."—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
A sweeping cultural and economic history of porcelain, from the eighteenth century to the present Porcelain was invented in medieval China—but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony's revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain's ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain's uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet even more culturally significant, roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining, and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth.Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, Porcelain traces the remarkable story of "white gold" from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in Germany's cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years, porcelain firms have come and gone, but the industry itself, at least until very recently, has endured. After Augustus, porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity, integral to provincial pride, artisanal industrial production, and a familial sense of home.Telling the story of porcelain's transformation from coveted luxury to household necessity and flea market staple, Porcelain offers a fascinating alternative history of art, business, taste, and consumption in Central Europe.

Chapter 1

Reinventing the Recipe

In 1976, in the waters around the lonely island of St. Helena, the Dutch underwater archaeologist Robert Sténuit made a remarkable find: the wreckage of the Dutch East Indiaman the White Lion. Portuguese warships had sunk the ship in 1613, as the two trading powers vied for control of shipping routes to the East Indies. The White Lion’s cargo gives us a snapshot of the commodities Europeans were willing to risk multiyear voyages, hard-won capital, and perilous seas to obtain: pepper and diamonds, but also barrel after barrel of another commodity: blue-and-white Ming porcelains.¹ Like pepper and diamonds, Chinese porcelain was a luxury good, before 1600 owned chiefly by Ottoman, Iberian, and Italian elites. But when, in 1602, the Dutch captured and auctioned off their first Portuguese boatload of porcelain, they discovered that northern Europeans, too, were willing to pay a premium for this delicate commodity, which, moreover, made an ideal, waterproof ballast. By the time Dutch East India Company merchants loaded up the White Lion, it had become quite conventional to fill holds with porcelains of many sizes and shapes, some of them quite humble (fig. 1.1). Northern Europe’s love affair with porcelain had begun.

The White Lion’s porcelains never made it to Amsterdam. But this ill-fated commercial voyage and the ship’s sunken cargo tip us off to two important realities about porcelain’s history that will resound through this book. The first is that while made in China since at least the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), porcelain soon became a commodity sought after by consumers of and traders in luxuries across the world. The second is that all porcelains are not created equal; there are exquisitely made grand vases and one-of-a-kind novelties, and there are modestly decorated, often almost invisible, utilitarian vessels—the ones whose sales often sustain the production of more “artistic” forms. As porcelain’s history is usually told as a tale either of luxury pieces or of single or regional manufactories, it is useful for us to begin by invoking this international commercial context and the long history of stylistic diversity and widely divergent price points. The White Lion reminds us to think globally, even as we focus on the central European chapters of this story, and not to forget the role played by ordinary household consumers in the sustaining of the luxury trades. This case, too, will not be the last of porcelain’s “shipwrecks,” reminding us that commercial success is generally fleeting, whether we are describing a single manufactory, a particular commodity, a fashionable style, a nation’s prosperity, or even the endurance of an entire industry. It is in the nature of commerce to be perpetually one White Lion away from ruin.

1.1. White Lion teacup

This humble teacup made up part of the salable ballast discovered in the hold of the shipwrecked White Lion. Intended for the Dutch market, this mass-produced Chinese vessel never made it to Amsterdam.

Properly, porcelain’s history, like the White Lion’s voyage, begins in China, and the centers of dispersion into northern Europe were England and the Netherlands. Both of these nations subsequently developed thriving ceramics industries of their own, though neither they nor the more elegant Italian and French makers of “soft-paste” porcelain or “faience” (named after Faenza, Italy, one of the early centers of production) were able to replicate the Chinese recipe for the highest-quality, “hard-paste” porcelains.² That distinction goes to Saxony, where in 1708 a would-be alchemist first made a translucent, white vessel comparable to those of the East Asian makers. Saxony’s state sponsorship of the industry generated a model imitated by princes across the Holy Roman Empire for whom porcelain making quickly became, as Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg described in 1758, “a necessary aspect of splendor [Glanz] and prestige [Würde].”³

By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a special relationship had developed between porcelain and central Europe, previously weakly integrated into the luxury markets to the west. That relationship would flourish and embrace an ever-widening consumer base, even as most state manufactories closed or were transferred into private hands, rendering central Europe, in the words of historian Friedrich Hofmann, “the classical land of porcelain making.”⁴

The story of central Europe’s passion for porcelain and the translation of that passion into an industry is the one told in this book. Porcelain making offered central European princes and states a means to demonstrate to the wealthier and more cultured Italian, French, Dutch, and English elites that they too could create elegant wares. For centuries it tantalized entrepreneurs in a generally low-consuming, war-torn region with hopes that a stable market for luxury goods might materialize. If dreams of prosperity through porcelain making were often dashed, the industry’s endless attempts to produce the most refined of all ceramics and to please buyers of all sorts entwined the commodity in the lives and hearts of central Europeans. This book will follow our commodity over time, as it made its way into the homes of more and more consumers, and as symbolic meanings changed. In the eighteenth century, porcelain served as a princely proof of Glanz; in the nineteenth, it bound itself up with regional pride, with bourgeois respectability, and with hygiene; in the twentieth century, porcelain became, especially for women, part of an indestructible sense of “home,” security, and continuity in the face of political upheaval and total war—even as it was also mobilized to make munitions and to embellish dictatorships. The central European entanglement with porcelain is not one we can grasp without delving deeply into the past and ranging across almost all aspects of life.

The foregoing may help to explain why this book, written by a historian, emphasizes porcelain’s production, consumption, and cultural significance rather than its artistry. Porcelain’s artistic masterpieces have been well studied by connoisseurs and museum curators; but to this author, the non-artistic aspects of porcelain’s history—its relationship to advances in mineralogy, chemistry, and marketing, for example, and its complicated relationship to state power—are as interesting as the history of its marketing and its use by consumers. These avenues of inquiry allow us to investigate, by a less usual route, the histories of industrialization, of commerce and consumption, of style and fashion, and of science. For porcelain came to central Europe as a scientific breakthrough that followed a cascade of other experiments and improvements, and its manufacture was propelled forward by political and economic concerns as well as aesthetic longings. It is a commodity that richly deserves a “total” history, or as “total” a history as this author can hope to conjure. Embarking at St. Helena with the White Lion, we have an eventful voyage—including many shipwrecks—ahead.

European Ceramics before Porcelain

Long before the White Lion took on its cargo in Java, elegant porcelains had been produced for centuries in various parts of East Asia. Production probably began first in Jingdezhen, China, where a translucent, green ceramic form was sought to mimic the highly prized “imperial gem,” jade. Although we cannot establish precisely the date of the first “discovery” of Chinese porcelain, the production of exquisite vessels for the emperor’s table was already a major industry in the eleventh century. The making of pottery is of course a much older activity, practiced the world over by prehistoric humans. But Chinese porcelain production at Jingdezhen was different in several ways: first of all, it was an industry so important to the ruling elites that it was owned and overseen by the imperial state. Secondly, it was already an industry that featured an extensive division of labor, including skilled and unskilled clay mixers, modelers, painters, and kiln tenders. It was said that seventy-two hands went into making a single pot.⁵ Thirdly, in a world in which virtually all production and consumption was local, here was an industry geared to exporting its products, in this case, chiefly to the court in Kaifeng and then (under the Yuan Dynasty) Beijing, which monopolized the purchase of the finest, all-white, line. In China, as in Europe for many centuries, porcelain was not for commoners.

Admirers in the Islamic world soon began to import Chinese porcelain, or to make their own imitations. Moving in the opposite direction were techniques and materials: the blue-and-white patterns that became so strongly associated with Chinese porcelain were enabled by the importing of Persian cobalt to China and Chinese adapting of Persian methods of painting in the fourteenth century. Blue-and-white porcelain was also cheaper to produce and easier to fire than the previously favored celadon imitations of jade, adding a pecuniary incentive for makers to switch styles.⁶ The addition of tin oxide to lead glazes—also pioneered in Asia Minor—made possible the opaque, white glazing of lesser-grade ceramics, such as “Iznik” wares, made in Anatolia from the fifteenth century, and “majolica” (named after the island of Majorca, where Italian traders acquired tin-glazed earthenwares from Andalusian makers). Usually decorated in strong blues, yellows, and reds, majolica, by the later fifteenth century, had already diffused northward with other Renaissance arts. As would be the case for European ceramics, experimentation never stopped, and recipes always varied, depending on local clays and other ingredients.

Before East Asian porcelain began to circulate widely in Europe, Europeans could make or purchase many other forms of ceramics. The most humble were unglazed earthenware vessels; stoneware, a more durable form of ceramics that can withstand firing at 1,000–1,200°C, and does not require a glaze, was a bit more costly. At the higher end, craftsmen labored to please noble patrons with ceramics that were also works of art, such as the majolica platters that depicted classical or biblical tales, or reproduced famous works of art, and were intended for show, not for daily use. Innovation—prompted by competition between craftsmen and by the scientific trends of the day—did not cease; in France, the Huguenot polymath Bernard Palissy made heroic, but unsuccessful, attempts to fire true porcelain, succeeding, however, in making majolica featuring a new palette of colors and unique, naturalistic designs. Meanwhile, in Faenza in northeastern Italy, another version of tin-glazed earthenware, subsequently known as “faience,” went into large-scale production. Faience was difficult and expensive to make, as kilns had to be stoked with precious wood to reach the firing temperature of 1,000°C. But there were great advantages. Faience’s smooth surface allows for elaborate overpainting with paints that do not bleed or smear, as was often true of majolica, or melt, as in the case of most early porcelain glazes. It too would quickly diffuse to the north and west, spurring a demand for ceramics that remained, however, pieces for display rather than tableware for regular use.

If majolica and faience were admired, East Asian porcelain retained the highest rank in luxury ceramics.⁷ It was more delicate, translucent, and glassy—but required whiter clays than southern Europe possessed and even higher firing temperatures (1,400°C) to produce. Southern princes found it irresistible, and as in painting, architecture, sculpture, music, and food, so too in ceramics, northern princes adopted southerners’ tastes. The Medici were the first great collectors, followed by Philip II of Spain, whose household by the time of his death in 1598 boasted some three thousand porcelains. Thanks to Sir Francis Drake’s raiding of Spanish ships, Elizabeth I acquired more than fifteen hundred blue-and-white pieces for her “Jewel House” in the Tower of London; the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37) owned only half as much.⁸ Commerce, too, first focused on Mediterranean markets, but soon shifted northward where the Dutch found new buyers. In 1608, the Dutch East India company (VOC) imported one hundred thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, selling some of it domestically, and exporting the rest to continental markets; by the 1630s, the Dutch imports were exceeding two hundred thousand pieces per year.⁹ Despite the disruptions of the Thirty Years’ War and the many other religious and civil conflicts of the period, the volume of the Dutch porcelain trade burgeoned during the next decades, reaching by one estimate more than three million pieces imported between 1604 and 1656 for the VOC alone.¹⁰

This surge in European purchases benefited Chinese producers, who had suffered a downturn in domestic orders thanks to the Ming Empire’s attempts at economizing. The Chinese ceramicists, who had been catering to the tastes of Ottoman and South Asian buyers for centuries, now varied their production methods to suit the Dutch and English East India Companies. Europeans could order particular designs or shapes from Chinese makers, though misunderstandings often took place. But just as European demand rose in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), political conflicts resulting in the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing Empire interrupted supply. More severe disruptions occurred in the period 1662–84, when the Qing closed ports and evacuated coastal areas. This shortage in supply led to rising prices for porcelains on the European market and the search for substitutes, which were found in fine ceramics made in Japan, Vietnam, and Persia, and in Dutch delftware.

Although the Chinese “china” trade made a powerful recovery in the later 1680s, the hiatus provided the context in which a flurry of new efforts to duplicate Asian recipes commenced.¹¹ Predictably, the Italians produced the first, best, imitations, generating large quantities of faience by the late sixteenth century. Under the patronage of the Medici, Florentine ceramicists also successfully fired a type of ceramics we now call “soft-paste porcelain,” because it is fired at a lower temperature than “true” or hard-paste porcelain, and has a stronger tendency to slump in the kiln.¹² “Soft-paste” shapes...