Antique Blue and White
Ceramics decorated in cobalt blue on a white ground, made for the table and the sideboard, from Chinese export porcelain and Dutch delft to English printed dishes.
Antique Blue and White
The grouping is held together by decoration, not by body or country. Porcelain, earthenware, pottery, ironstone and tin-glaze all appear, and what they share is cobalt blue laid on a white ground. Tableware and serving pieces dominate: bowls, dishes, chargers, platters and tureens are the shapes named again and again.
Cobalt under a clear glaze was perfected in Chinese porcelain and arrived in Europe as export ware. Tin-glazed imitations followed from the 17th century in Holland, England, France and Italy. From the later 18th century English factories got the same effect cheaply by printing patterns from engraved copper plates, which put blue-printed dinner and toilet wares into ordinary houses.
Five strands run through the listings. English transfer-printed pottery and ironstone is the largest, carrying named patterns such as Willow, Italian, Greek, Tower, Elephant and India Temple. Chinese porcelain follows, from Kraak and Ming through Kangxi and later export Nanking, including shipwreck cargo pieces. Then Dutch and English delft and other tin-glaze, Japanese Arita and Imari, and a smaller strand of English factory porcelain led by Worcester.
Dates are usually brackets rather than years. Of 743 listings on Sellingantiques, 221 carry a clean year, and the two commonest labels are the vaguest: "19th Century" and "18th Century". Read those as the dealer's period bracket. Alongside the tableware sit tiles, jars, jardinieres, footbaths, ewer-and-basin sets and one-off oddities like a wine taster, an egg drainer and a scholar's brush washer.
Top And Bottom
Identification does most of the work. A title that carries a factory and a pattern together sits well above one that reads simply "blue and white bowl" or "blue and white basin". Much of the category is unsigned and stays generic, and generic is where the lower band lives.
Scale and completeness push the other way. "Large" turns up in a good many titles, and the biggest stated pieces, a 73cm Japanese charger, a 71cm Imari wall charger, garden seats and jardinieres called monumental, cluster at the upper end. Pairs recur near the top, as do dinner services, supper sets, child's services and tureens still with cover and stand. Single plates and single Delft tiles anchor the bottom.
Date and method of decoration mark the rest of the range. Titles invoking Ming, Wanli, Kangxi, 17th-century Arita or a named shipwreck cargo sit high, and 20th-century decorative pieces sit low. Hand painting, on delft, faience and Chinese wares, holds the upper reaches, while English transfer printing fills the middle and lower band.
Antique Blue and White Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for blue and white, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
19th Century is the period label used most on Sellingantiques for blue and white, with 18th Century next and the decade label 1800s third.
Worcester·Spode·Wedgwood·Ridgway·Minton·Mason's Ironstone·John Rogers & Son·Caughley·Derby·Doulton Burslem·J. & R. Clews·Herculaneum
The Antique Blue and White Glossary
- Transfer print
- A pattern printed from an engraved copper plate onto tissue, then laid on the ware before glazing. It appears in dozens of titles and covers most English printed pottery here.
- Pattern
- The named design a factory issued. Willow, Italian, Greek, Tower, Elephant and India Temple all turn up, and "pattern" is one of the commonest words in these titles.
- Charger
- A large flat dish, often meant for display rather than serving. More than fifty appear, Chinese, Japanese and delft among them.
- Meat platter
- A large oval dish for a joint, sometimes with a gravy well or a tree cut into the base. Often paired with a drainer, the pierced flat insert that lifted the meat clear of the juices.
- Pearlware
- Late-Georgian earthenware with a bluish tint to the glaze, the usual body under early blue printing. Ironstone, or stone china, is the denser body used for heavy dinner and serving wares.
- Kraak and Nanking
- Two Chinese export types: Kraak for the earlier panelled dishes, Nanking for later export blue-and-white.
Antique Blue and White: Frequently Asked Questions
Is blue and white mostly English?
No. Chinese titles slightly outnumber English ones across the archive, so the category leans as much to Asian porcelain as to Staffordshire pottery.
English transfer-printed pottery and ironstone is still the single largest strand, and a named pattern on an English dish or platter is the most repeated thing on Sellingantiques. Chinese export porcelain runs a close second, with Japanese Arita and Imari behind it.
What does "19th Century" mean in a listing?
It means the dealer's bracket, not a year. Of the dated listings, 198 are given as simply "19th Century" and 138 as "18th Century", which makes the two commonest labels the least precise ones.
Where a listing does carry a clean year, or a circa form such as c1820, that is a narrower claim. Reign labels like Georgian, Victorian and Regency sit somewhere in between.
Which shapes come up most often?
Serving pieces. Bowls lead, then dishes, chargers, platters and tureens, with plates behind them.
Around the tableware sits a smaller run of tiles, jars, jardinieres and utility forms. Footbaths, a patterned sink, ewer-and-basin bathroom sets, a dairy milk pail and a baby feeder bottle have all been listed.
Are Delft tiles part of this category?
Yes, and they are the usual entry point. They appear singly and in sets of five, six and eight, and they cluster at the very bottom of the range.
Delft accounts for a good number of titles overall, Dutch and English both, with Bristol and Lambeth named as English origins. Beyond tiles the delft forms include chargers, jars, posset pots, bough pots, apothecary jars and plaques.
What is shipwreck cargo porcelain?
Chinese porcelain recovered from wrecked trading ships and sold with that provenance attached. Nanking Cargo, Ca Mau and "Ming Cargo" pieces all appear in these titles.
It runs as a small sub-thread rather than a branch of its own, and sits with the earlier-dated Chinese material near the top of the range.
How many dealers offer blue and white?
143 different dealers have offered pieces in this category, one of the widest dealer bases in ceramics on Sellingantiques.
About 88 pieces are listed a year. That spread is why the category runs from single tiles to monumental jardinieres and garden seats.