Dating Ceramics by the Foot and the Glaze

Decorated surfaces are the part people examine and the part reproductions copy best. The foot is where a piece tells you how it was made, and it is the part nobody bothers to fake convincingly.

Turn it over first

The foot rim is where the glaze stops, because a glazed foot fuses to the kiln shelf. That unglazed band records the manufacturing process directly.

Hand-thrown and hand-finished pieces show slight asymmetry, tool marks from trimming, and a rim that is not perfectly level. Run a finger round it and you can feel the variation.

Machine-made pieces have a rim that is even in width and height all the way round, with a clean mechanical edge.

Kiln grit — small hard particles fused into the unglazed foot — indicates firing directly on a shelf with sand or grit as a separator, which is old practice.

What the glaze does at the edge

Glaze is liquid in the kiln and behaves like it. On older pieces it pools slightly where it meets the foot, thickens in hollows, and thins over raised edges.

Modern sprayed glaze is even in thickness across the whole surface, including places where gravity would have pulled an older glaze away. An absolutely uniform glaze layer on a piece claimed to be eighteenth century is a problem.

Wear tells you more than age

An old piece has been picked up, put down and slid across surfaces thousands of times. The wear is on the contact ring of the foot, not spread across the base, and it is smooth rather than scratched.

Fake wear is usually applied with abrasive, which produces scratches running in one direction and reaching places a table never touched. Look inside the foot rim: a genuine piece is barely worn there because it never touched anything.

Chips are informative

An unfortunate chip shows the body beneath the glaze, which is the hardest thing to fake because it is the material itself.

Eighteenth-century soft-paste porcelain is slightly granular and off-white. Nineteenth-century bone china is very white and translucent. Modern porcelain is bright white and dense. Earthenware is porous and shows a matte, absorbent surface at the break.

Hold a thin piece against a strong light: porcelain transmits light, earthenware does not.

Marks come last

A mark is the easiest thing to copy and the first thing people look at, which is exactly backwards. Establish the age from the foot, the glaze and the body, then check whether the mark agrees. A mark that contradicts the physical evidence means the mark is wrong, not the object.

The marks that date an object exactly covers reading them when they are genuine, and how reproductions give themselves away covers what a copied mark looks like under magnification.

Transfer printing and hand painting

Under a loupe the two are unmistakable. Hand painting shows brush strokes, variation in pigment density, and small departures where the painter's hand wavered. Transfer printing shows fine engraved lines and, on early work, visible joins where the paper transfer was cut and butted together to fit a curved surface.

Modern lithographic decoration shows a regular dot pattern, exactly like a printed photograph, which no nineteenth-century process produces.

That single distinction separates a great deal of nineteenth-century blue and white from twentieth-century imitation of it, and it needs nothing but magnification.

Repairs

Old repairs are themselves evidence of age. Riveted repairs, where holes were drilled either side of a crack and metal staples inserted, were common until the early twentieth century and are never done now.

A riveted plate is genuinely old, though the repair reduces its value considerably. Modern adhesive repairs fluoresce differently under ultraviolet light, which is the standard way dealers check for restoration before buying.