Three porcelain plates lie side by side on a felt-covered table in Hester Lloyd's office in Hudson, New York. The first carries crossed swords in underglaze blue. The second, two interlaced Ls. The third, a crescent moon. Each mark is older than two centuries.
The three marks identify the three most important porcelain factories of the eighteenth century: Meissen near Dresden, Sèvres near Versailles, and Worcester in the English midlands. The vocabulary of marks each used has been the subject of more confusion, and more forgery, than any other category of ceramic identification.
Meissen began in 1710, the first hard-paste porcelain factory in Europe. Its early production carried no consistent mark. The crossed swords, drawn from the arms of the Electorate of Saxony, were adopted as a regular mark in about 1722 and have continued in use, with minor variations, to the present day.
The shape and angle of the swords, the depth of the pommel, and the position of any dot or asterisk added between the blades all carry meaning for the dating of a piece. A nineteenth-century reference book by E. W. Hutschenreuther catalogued some forty-three distinct sword variants, each correlated to a date range.
The asterisk between the swords, used from about 1763 to 1774, indicates the Marcolini period, named for Count Camillo Marcolini, the factory director. Marcolini-period pieces are stylistically distinct: lighter palette, more restrained painting, smaller figures.
After 1774 the asterisk disappeared, replaced by a small dot — the Punktzeit, the dotted period. The dot appears in various positions and remained in use until 1814. After 1814 the swords were used alone again, with occasional variations.
Sèvres marks are more complex. The factory was founded at Vincennes in 1740 and moved to Sèvres in 1756. The interlaced LL — for Louis XV — was the standard mark from the factory's founding.
Between the two Ls, a small letter indicates the year of manufacture. A for 1753, B for 1754, C for 1755, and so on through the alphabet. The system reset after 1777, with double letters: AA for 1778, BB for 1779.
The year-letter system makes early Sèvres the most precisely datable porcelain in Europe. A piece marked with the year letter J inside the interlaced Ls can be placed to 1762 with confidence.
Painters at Sèvres signed their work with a personal mark, usually a small initial or symbol painted in a contrasting colour beside the factory mark. A painter named Charles-Nicolas Dodin, active from 1754 to 1803, signed with a small k and is responsible for some of the finest figural painting on Sèvres soft-paste.
After the Revolution, the LL mark was abandoned briefly. Various republican marks appeared between 1793 and 1804, none of them widely adopted. The interlaced Ls returned during the Restoration in 1814.
Sèvres forgeries are abundant. The eighteenth-century factory was so prestigious that a trade in forgeries began in the late nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. The most common forgery technique was to take a genuine but undecorated Sèvres blank — sold legitimately by the factory for outside decoration — and add lavish painting and fake dating to suggest a date of original manufacture.
These pieces are not, strictly speaking, fake porcelain. The body is genuine Sèvres. The mark on the underside may also be genuine. But the decoration was added perhaps a century later, by an outside decorator, and the piece is now valued at a small fraction of what its appearance might suggest.
Worcester marks present a different challenge. The factory opened in 1751 under the partnership of Dr John Wall and produced soft-paste porcelain until the partnership was reorganised in 1783. The crescent moon mark appears on Worcester pieces from about 1755 to about 1783.
The crescent was used in two forms: a simple crescent in underglaze blue for blue-and-white wares, and a painted crescent in the colour of the principal decoration for polychrome pieces. The simple crescent is the more common.
A small W, drawn in underglaze blue, also appears on some Worcester pieces of the same period. The W and the crescent are sometimes both present; the W alone is rare.
Worcester after 1783 used a different system. The Flight period, from 1783 to 1792, used the word FLIGHTS in script. The Barr, Flight and Barr period, from 1804 to 1813, used initials. The Chamberlain Worcester firm, working in competition with the original factory until the two merged in 1840, used its own marks.
Hester Lloyd's three plates on the felt are working examples, used to teach. The Meissen is from about 1745, before the Marcolini period; the Sèvres is from 1761, with year letter H; the Worcester is from about 1770, with the simple crescent and a painted scene of three small birds.
Each plate, she says, took some patience to identify. The Meissen sword form had to be matched against Hutschenreuther. The Sèvres year letter had to be read under a strong light. The Worcester crescent had to be distinguished from the dozens of imitation crescents used by smaller English factories of the period.
Imitation crescents are the most common Worcester problem. The Caughley factory, operating in Shropshire from about 1772, used a crescent so similar to Worcester's that the two are often confused. The distinction usually rests on the body — Caughley's soft-paste has a faintly straw-coloured translucency, Worcester's a slightly greener cast.
These are subtleties that cannot be learned from a book. The reference books are necessary but not sufficient. The eye is built by handling many pieces, comparing the marks at the bench, asking older dealers what they see.
Lloyd returns the three plates to their wrapping. The Meissen will go back into the cabinet; the Sèvres and the Worcester will travel to a workshop in Brooklyn next week, where a careful conservator will attend to small chips in the rims.
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