Pottery
The easiest way to determine if a china is antique is to look for the newest , and by a process of elimination discover those that might be valuable items, it is easier to determine whether a dish is new than it is to be sure that it is old. Judging a painting is much the same, for it is often easier to tell that a painting is not a work of art.
Marks
The first step is to turn the dish over to see if there is a mark on the bottom. If the name of the country of origin is on the bottom, the dish was probably made after 1890, when the United States Government passed a law requiring that the name of the country of origin appear in writing on each piece of pottery or porcelain imported into the United States.
In general, the common pieces are plenty and by identifying the common items, you will recognize the rarer one as they are different.
“RD” means “register”. Each pattern of English china was registered with the government Patent Office after 1885. Diamond shaped marks which contained coded information on the patent date and manufacturer were used from 1842-1883.If there is a letter at the top inside the diamond, the dish was designed from 1842-1867. If a number from 1 to 31 appears inside the top of the mark, the piece was designed from 1868-1883. If there is no diamond, but the letters “RD” and a number from 1 to 548,920, the piece was registered from 1884-1909. Information on those may be available from the Public Record Office, Ruskin England. Larger numbers date after 1909.
Shapes
When there is no mark on a dish, the trick is that earlier wares are heavier than later ones of the same type. The change in weight has been due to improved methods of manufacturing. Early plates have no rim of the bottom;. The foot rim is found on nineteenth-century wares. Plates made prior to 1850 often have an unglazed foot.
Old dishes should show some signs of wear, and sometimes the plate might be slightly uneven.
For tea sets, the earliest tea sets were copies of oriental one. Because the Chinese drank lukewarm tea, the cup could be griped and therefore no handle was necessary. In the early sets the teacup was often without a handle; only the coffee cups and chocolate cups had handles. The trick is cups without handles are usually older than those with handles. In addition, early teapot were much smaller because tea was an expensive beverage during the eighteenth century. And since small cups were used, only a small cups one-or-two-cup teapot was necessary.
Tips also include looking at the holes inside the pot that led to the spout. The earlier pots (eighteenth century) had fewer holes than the later pots. The holes are often jagged and uneven.
As the Europeans made and glazed the teapot body and its lid separately, by examining the top rim of a non-oriental teapot, you can find that the glaze covers all of it.
The difference between pottery and porcelain is that pottery is opaque and can not been seen through it but porcelain is translucent and light can been seen through it if held in from of a strong light. Besides the difference mentioned above, a pottery is thicker, softer, colder and more porous than porcelain. And Porcelain is lighter, more durable and expensive than pottery.
Some pottery for sale on eBay.
