While some leading European museum collections were formed in the 19th century, including the outstanding collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Doccia wares were frequently mis-sold as Capodimonte, the highly decorative, popular
soft-paste porcelain manufactured in Naples in the 1740s and '50s.
The East Anglian factory was active from 1757 to 1802, longer than any other
soft-paste porcelain producer other than Worcester and Derby, but its products were functional, unsophisticated domestic wares based on shapes copied from silver pieces.
Its early
soft-paste porcelain products were aimed at the aristocratic market.
This is a Sevres
soft-paste porcelain plate made and decorated in 1786.
Originally, it produced
soft-paste porcelain wares.
Then the start of court patronage in the 1470s was the catalyst for a radical leap from ceramic production for the peasant population to a type of fritware related to
soft-paste porcelain that expressed a new and different spirit of sophistication.
Soft-paste porcelain, polychrome enamel decoration, gilt-bronze mounts, enameled metal, glass; 29 1/2 x 14 x 4 3/8" (74.9 x 35.6 x 11.1 cm).
PHOTO : Covered bowl of
soft-paste porcelain, Italy, c.
In 1744, when the Huguenot silversmith Nicholas Sprimont developed
soft-paste porcelain at his Chelsea factory in emulation of the miraculous wares being produced in Germany and France, his market was the aristocracy.
It was made in what the specialists call
soft-paste porcelain, not hard-paste, which at the time was being produced only in China where the secret of how to produce it had been discovered centuries earlier.
By this date, Coalport was able to achieve a rich, white, highly translucent porcelain that made it possible for them to imitate, though not equal, the famous
soft-paste porcelain of Svres, something both Swansea and Nantgarw porcelain had also attempted earlier in the century.
Bone ash, the white residue that results from the calcination of cattle bones, is a flux that was originally used by Josiah Spode, an Englishman in the late 18th century, to improve
soft-paste porcelain. This resulted in the first invention of bone china.