Delft marks

How to read it

Potters in Delft began imitating Chinese porcelain soon after the first ships carrying it reached the Netherlands around 1600, covering a yellowish clay in a white glaze made with tin. The museums behind the Dutch Delftware site call pieces made between 1620 and 1850 antique Delftware and later pieces modern Delftware. More than thirty potteries once worked in Delft. Their marks, letters or pictures that include the name of the pottery, came into wider use from the late 1600s, and the site says only around a third of Delftware has a mark at all. De Porceleyne Fles (The Porcelain Bottle), founded in 1653, is the only one left, known today as Royal Delft.

Also searched as: delft blue marks, delft marks, delftware, de porceleyne fles, royal delft mark.

The Royal Delft mark

Royal Delft’s museum says every hand-painted piece made by De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles since 1879 carries a mark made of a beaker or apothecary bottle, the initials JT for Joost Thooft, who owned the company from 1876, and the word Delft. The painter’s initials sit to the left of it and two letters to the right give the year. William Chaffers’s catalogue (1912 edition), whose editor visited in 1895, records the firm’s other mark, the name Thoovt & Labouchere impressed in a circle, and says it then made reproductions of old Delft, mostly blue on white, with some 200 workers. The Dutch Delftware site adds that under Thooft the factory began casting slip in moulds, the method most makers use today.

Delft as a style word

The word on a base often does not mean the town. The Dutch Delftware site says the name is not protected and is used for blue-and-white ceramics in general, and that in the late 19th century manufacturers outside Delft put “Delft” on the base of their products. On the marks of Petrus Regout’s Sphinx factory in Maastricht, for example, “Delfts” names the source of the decoration, not the place it was made. The site also notes that stamped marks were not introduced until the late 19th century, and its index of marks groups modern pieces marked “Delft”, “Delfts” or “Made in Holland” apart from antique ones.

Look-alikes

Other places made tin-glazed earthenware too. Potteries in Rotterdam, Makkum and Amsterdam made wares like Delft’s, and in England “delftware” with a small d became the name for all tin-glazed earthenware. In the 19th century French makers, the best known Edmé Samson of Paris and Geo Martel of Desvres, made faience in the old Delft style with copies of Delft factory marks; the Dutch Delftware site says Samson pieces sometimes have an S or X beside the copied mark.