Royal Danish blue-decorated porcelain

Magazine Antiques, August, 1999 by Lauritz G. Dorenfeldt

The Danish Porcelain Manufactory with the aid of the dowager queen of Denmark and Norway, Juliane Marie (Pl.III). She was the stepmother of the mad king Christian VII (1749-1808) and assumed control of the kingdom after a coup d'etat in 1772.

Christian VII's father, Frederik V (1725-1766), had employed arcanists who claimed they could produce the kind of hard-paste porcelain made in Meissen since about 1709 and, beginning about the middle of the century, in Berlin and Furstenberg. However, their many costly attempts failed to produce porcelain until, between 1772 and 1774, the Danish chemist and apothecary Frantz Henrich Mallet (1752-1820) combined quartz, feldspar, and kaolin to make true porcelain. The kaolin was found on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, and, in 1772, cobalt, which is used for underglaze blue decoration, was found quite by accident in the hills near Modum in Norway, which was then united with Denmark.

The famous Furstenberg porcelain factory was owned by Juliane Marie's brother Duke Charles I (1713-1780) of Brunswick. With both the essential kaolin and cobalt found within her kingdom, Juliane Marie was in a position to rival her brother in the production of porcelain. The Danish Porcelain Manufactory was founded as a joint-stock company ruled by a board consisting chiefly of those close to the court. They were Hans Henrik Eickstedt (1715-1801), the prime minister; Theodor Holm (1731-1793), the cabinet secretary to Juliane Marie; Ove Guldberg (1751-1808), the cabinet secretary to Prince Frederik (d. 1805), the heir presumptive;] and Peter Frederik Suhm (1728-1798), a historian and the court chamberlain. No doubt to his great disappointment, Muller was not on the board. Instead he was given the position of master of production. The state acquired sole ownership of the factory on April 21, 1779, saving it from economic disaster, and the name was changed to the Royal Danish Porcelain Manufactory.

From the beginning, it was understood that the production of wares decorated in underglaze blue was to take precedence over porcelain with overglaze polychrome decoration.(2) The first blamaler, literally blue painter, named in the factory archives is Lars Hansen, a Norwegian who started in 1775 after having served as a musketeer in the Holstein Infantry Regiment stationed in Copenhagen. He must have been exceptionally gifted because he was paid his first wages as a painter after only a year of apprenticeship. As early as 1779, according to factory records, Muller assigned him to design decorations.(3)

The first years of the factory were difficult. The Bornholm kaolin was not sufficiently pure, and the first porcelain emerged from the kiln looking grayish and mottled, like ordinary stoneware. Controlling the temperature in the kilns proved very difficult, and the cobalt from Modum often turned grayish or even black and frequently burned through the glaze during firing (see Pl. V). This first experimental period is often called the first Bornholm period.

In 1778 the factory began to import kaolin from Saint Yrieix (now Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche) in France, and the resulting porcelain had the desired whiteness. The glaze at this time was a faintly bluish green that was not planned but much impressed Arnold Krog (1856-1931), the art director at the factory from 1885 to 1916, who wrote about "this thin veil of grey-green, reminding one of the air over the sea on a quiet summer morning just before sunrise" 4 (see Pl.VII).

From 1793 to 1801 the French Revolution interrupted deliveries of kaolin from Saint Yrieix, as did England's naval blockade of Denmark in 1807 during war with France. Once again, the Copenhagen factory had to make do with local materials, and in what is known as the second Bornholm period, the porcelain was once again gray and mottled.

Both shapes and decoration were copied freely from Meissen porcelain. However, the factory successfully blended the rococo Meissen shapes with neoclassical knobs and handles that were more in the taste of the time. Among the easily recognized Meissen patterns imitated in Copenhagen were onion, rock and bird, blue flower (see Pls. IV, VI, VII), and Muschel, the formal flower pattern called blue fluted in English (see Pls. I, II, V, IX-XIII). In 1781, a Berlin service called star fluted had also been copied in Copenhagen (see Pl. VIII).

Dinner services in the eighteenth century included forms not produced today, such as the plat-de-menage or cruet stand, for mustard, oil, vinegar, and pepper, with space for an ornamental figure in the center. Three such figures are known to have been made in Copenhagen (see Pl. VIII). There were dishes with bell-shaped covers for ices (see Pl. X) and more elaborate three-piece dishes for keeping sorbets, caviar, and other perishables cold (see Pls. IX, b). Oblong dishes with pierced drainer inserts were made for fish and asparagus (see Pl. I), and each place setting included a lidded custard cup.

Coffee, tea, and chocolate were the fashionable drinks at the end of the eighteenth century, and they required a formidable army of cups, pots, slop basins, tea caddies (see Pl. V), cream pots, and sugar basins. The cylindrical chocolate pots are of particular interest because on the lid is a small supplementary brass lid (see Pl. XII). This swings aside to reveal a hole through which a thin stick may be inserted to stir the chocolate.