Porcelain Ceramics

Porcelain  Ceramics

A Beginners Guide

Porcelain

Porcelain has a white translucent body.
It is dense, vitrified and impermeable to water. Porcelain is made from a combination of kaolin or china clay, petuntse or feldspar and quartz. There are several kinds of porcelain - hard,
laboratory, soft and bone china.

Porcelain  Ceramics

Porcelain was first discovered by the Chinese and when it arrived in Europe in the 15th century it caused a sensation. European monarchs and potters vied with each other to be the first to discover its secrets.  









        

Porcelain  Ceramics

Soft porcelain

A small amount of porcelain was successfully made in Florence in 1575 and by the late-17th century 

' France, too, had developed a soft porcelain body. This contained lots of finely ground glass in the clay mixture which made it very hard to form and to fire.

Soft porcelain was made by French factories such as Sevres until 1804, and in Britain at Bow, Chelsea, Swansea, Worcester and Derby. Several different recipes and formulas were used by these companies. Soft porcelain is also sometimes called 'artificial' porcelain.

Hard porcelain

Porcelain  Ceramics

The alchemist, Johann Bottger, working for the elector of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, was the first to discover (after much experimentation) how to make hard porcelain. In c.1707, he produced an extremely fine, hard red stoneware, which was followed in 1708 by a white hard porcelain body.

Augustus built a factory at Meissen in 1710, but despite stringent efforts to keep production secret, other hard porcelain factories were built in  Vienna, Berlin and Munich while the Ginori family began manufacture in Florence in 1737 and the Herend factory opened in Hungary in 1824. In England between 1760 and c.1815, hard porcelain was made by makers in Plymouth, Bristol and New Hall in The Potteries.

Hard and soft porcelain: the differences

Hard and soft paste porcelain differ not only in composition but in other ways.

Porcelain  Ceramics

Hard or true porcelain needs only to be fired once at 1300°C - 1400°C. It is glazed before firing (sometimes for practicality a short firing at a low temperature before glazing takes place - this makes pieces less fragile and therefore easier to handle during production processes).


Soft porcelain is fired twice, first unglazed at temperatures of 1200°C - 1300°C and then after glazing at a lower temperature of around A 1050°C - 1150°C. Hard porcelain is highly resistant to temperature changes and to thermal shock,which makes it more suitable as cookware.

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