How do you clean early porcelain?

Dust it first with a soft brush. If it needs washing, use warm water and a very mild soap in a plastic bowl. Don't put them in the dishwasher. The harsh chemicals and heat will strip the overglaze enamels and ruin the gilding. Let items air dry on a soft towel.

Can you use old teacups daily?

You certainly can. Hard-paste antique porcelain handles hot liquids well. Soft-paste requires a bit more care. Pouring boiling water straight into a cold soft-paste cup can cause it to crack. Warm the cup gently first.

I have inherited a large dinner service that has lots of blue painted flowers on it but a few pieces have brown stains underneath the glaze, why is this?

Staining usually happens when the glaze gets scratched or crazed. Dirt and grease seep through those tiny cracks into the porous clay body underneath. This is much more common with soft-paste or earthenware bodies. Hard-paste antique porcelain is vitrified, so even if the glaze chips, the body itself repels stains.

The marks on the bottom of these plates are painted in blue and look a bit smudged, what causes the mark to bleed like that?

Painters applied blue marks directly onto the porous biscuit body before the glaze went on. The liquid cobalt pigment can spread slightly into the surrounding dry clay. When the glaze is added and fired, it sometimes pulls the blue colour with it. This creates a blurred halo effect around the mark. It happens frequently with early underglaze painting.

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Art Nouveau Porcelain

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Antique porcelain is a hard, translucent ceramic fired at high temperatures, historically shaped into everything from delicate teacups and dinner services to elaborate figurative centrepieces for the tables of the wealthy.