Delft
From the website of De Delftse Pauw, http://www.delftsepauw.com/, we learn that :
“In the sixteenth century, in a number of Dutch towns, factories were established which among their items produced "Majolica". This "Majolica" was made with a tin-glaze and found its origins in Italy and Spain. The Dutch East Indian Company began importing porcelain from China in the seventeenth century. This porcelain, especially the blue and white became very popular. “The "Majolica" producing factories started at a certain moment to imitate this Chinese porcelain, because of several reasons. The imported Chinese porcelain meant competition. Civil war in China made that imports from China went down. Customers asked for specific items which due to distance took a long time to deliver and due to language problems the delivered item was not always what was ordered. In Delft, in the seventeenth century 32 factories were producing Delftware. One of them was a factory called "de Paauw". These factories were often established in beerbreweries which had stopped their production. In the nineteenth century due to competition from other factories like Wedgewood in England and lack of innovations, the highlight of Delftware had come to a close. Nowadays in Delft only a few companies still produce the entirely handpainted traditional Delftware. One of these companies is "de Delftse Pauw". A company which is very loyal to this tradition.”
The Delft City website (www.delft.nl) features a number of factories that produce the famous pottery; for example the Royal Delft factory, Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles, dating from 1653, claims to be the only one that has remained operational in the city since the 17c. Their Royal Delft web site shows colorations that range from the traditional blue to polychrome, pinjacker (red, blue and gold decorations, based on Japanese Imari), and black.
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My collection includes a few older ones, and a small herd of the modern, mass-produced (if hand painted!) versions, many of which my wife and I bought in Delft when we visited there in the late ‘90s. This was another trip where we ended up having to buy an extra suitcase…The range of variation is depicted here.
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Here are three more old German porcelain creamers in Delftware blue style. |
  
These two lovely Delft creamers, one blue and white and the other polychrome, are by different artists using Mold 795 of the Oud Delft Company, which - from www.sephari.com – we learn was founded by Roelof Elshout in 1920, as an offshoot of the Potterie Rembrandt in Nijmegen. The factory passed to his brother Hugo, then to Hugo’s daughter Cora in 1988. In 1996 the company was incorporated into Aardwerkfabirek’t Delftshce Huys B.V., and moved to Waddinxveen where it still manufactures earthenware products. I don’t know the age of these creamers, but they certainly date from before 1968 when the company switched from the hand-painted mark (a stylized potters wheel) to a printed version. Oud Delft is noted for using an opaque white glaze with no tin or lead oxide, to mimic a tin-glazed look, over the white biscuit of modern Delftware. |
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  This creamer is quite similar to the two from Oud Delft. It is certainly from a very similar mold, but has a different, duller glaze(probably tin), and a much rougher texture to the ceramic. The base bears the initials AL, but the maker’s mark is missing and appears from scratch marks to have been scraped or chipped off. Why someone would deliberately obliterate it I don’t know…perhaps it was considered a ‘second’ and the maker wanted to make sure it didn’t carry their mark? If so, it isn’t clear to me what the problem may have been. The seller, from the UK, marketed it as Faience, probably Angouleme, @19c; since she sells mostly Faience, and that term basically means tin-glazed earthenware, she could well be correct. I have included it here however because of its close resemblance to the two that are definitely Delft. Might it be that Oud, a fairly modern company, borrowed or copied an earlier mold? |
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Here are a couple nice modern versions, from different factories but both marked for Delft and handpainted |
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Here are two more examples of “Delftware”, with different shapes and coloration. Just as the Delft potters mimicked the Chinese coloration when it became popular in the 17c, so many other factories -- e.g., in Germany, Japan and China -- have mimicked Delftware. The creamer on the left in this picture, although not marked, is porcelain and has tiny pointy teats, and is almost certainly an older German creamer; the one on the right is signed for W.H.Sechler, about whom I can find no information. |
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This is an interesting German pair – German for sure because it’s incised on the right flank of the larger one, along with a mold mark; the smaller has just a mold mark. These have the decoration on only one side, and I haven’t seen the ‘birds’ on any others. |
  
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I’m not quite sure what to make of this little guy – rather crude heavy ceramic, with a belly-stamp and a silver sticker on the back of its head that read Holland, hand painted, Delfts Blue with a windmill in the background…and also on the sticker and a silver tag, “Origineel Bo-kado”. Can’;t find them on the web…and since none of the terms are copyrighted, it’s as likely Chinese as Dutch. If the good Bo-kado folks are indeed in the Netherlands perhaps they can correct me. |
 
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This one doesn’t even pretend to be from Holland, albeit it does have the Delft-like motif … it’s clearly marked Japan on the bottom. It’s included largely as a reminder to folks (including myself) who may think they have a piece of Delftware, that that term is not restricted to use by potteries from the area, and many if not most ceramic figures that ‘look’ delft are from Japan or China. |
