"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.

It is the experience probably of most Western amateurs of porcelain to pass through three successive stages of development in their appreciation of an art which, even for the uninitiated, --for those who have no knowledge of its history and little understanding of its technical aspects, --is not lacking in charm and fascination.--pg. xiii.

This is the fifth revised edition of a standard work of reference which was first published in 1969. It is a remarkable book that effortlessly and enjoyably takes the reader from the earliest pottery extant dating from the first Neolithic period, through the great classical names such as Wedgwood and Spode, Staffordshire and Ironstone to the more readily collectable pottery of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many individual studies of potteries and potters but here Griselda Lewis succeeds in putting this vast array of them into an understandable historical perspective and traces the links in the development of the rich tradition of pottery in England. This book triumphantly succeeds in the most difficult task of all, that of arousing enthusiasm. - this comment by a reviewer on a previous edition of the work neatly sums up one of the main reasons for the book's enduring success. The new edition contains almost three times as much colour as the first edition and benefits from the wealth of research that has gone on in the past twelve years. There is a large section on modern studio potters and commercial wares that will be of particular interest to the contemporary collector. AUTHOR: Griselda Lewis is author of many books on pottery including An Introduction to English Pottery, A Picture History of English Pottery, Prattware (with John Lewis) and A Handbook of Crafts. 175 colour & 173 b/w illustrations