bone china

 

variety of porcelain developed by English potters in the last half of the 18th and early 19th cent. The clay is tempered with phosphate of lime or bone ash. This innovation greatly increased the strength of the porcelain during and after firing.

Bibliography

See B. and T. Hughes, English Porcelain and Bone China, 1743–1850 (1955); H. Peter and N. Schiffer, China for America: Export Porcelain of the 18th and 19th Century (1979).

Bone china is a type of porcelain body first developed in Britain in which calcined ox bone (bone ash) is a major constituent. It is characterised by high whiteness, translucency and strength. Production usually involves a two stage firing where the first, bisque, is without a glaze at 1280 °C (2336 °F), which gives a translucent product and then glaze, or glost, fired at a lower temperature below 1080 °C (1976 °F).

English manufacturers were keen to produce porcelain of the quality to be found in Chinese imports, but they had to go down a different route. The first use of bone ash in ceramics is attributed to Thomas Frye in 1748 to make a type of soft-paste porcelain, at his Bow China Works^[1]. In the late 18th century, Josiah Spode undertook further developments, and subsequently popularised it, by mixing it with china clay, kaolin and China stone to compete with the imported Oriental porcelain.

See also

• Soft-paste porcelain
• Hard-paste porcelain

References

External links

• How Bone china works

Donate to Wikimedia