The dramatic combination of art porcelain and rock crystal was something that only one studio – Albany Fine China – chose to utilize in any quantity. All of those designs also incorporated bronze as well. Several of the crystal-enhanced sculptures were an ‘upgraded’ version of the same piece’s standard porcelain-and-bronze version, the most interesting being…
The fragility of fine porcelain figurines is certainly part of their beauty, but that same attribute can make them tricky to clean, if and when that’s needed. In reality it’s ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, because one of the Great Mysteries of Everyday Life is how something can get dusty despite being kept inside a curio…
As evidenced by the growing number of ‘lost’ porcelain studios I have been profiling here, and the number of inquiries I receive asking about the current market value of their porcelain(s), it is useful to take a look at the story of the industry (and its market) overall. ‘Art porcelain’ is the term often used…
Having covered the technical details of combining fragile porcelain with unyielding bronze in my previous ‘Porcelain Plus…’ post, this will serve as an armchair gallery-tour of what four major studios (Boehm, Albany, Royal Worcester, and the David Fryer Studio) produced in this genre. All of these items date from the 1980s. Boehm Porcelain/Bronze Boehm was…
The pairing of fine porcelain with metal components instantly creates a dichotomy: Here we have one of the most fragile of man’s creations combined with one of the most durable – especially if the metal happened to be bronze. The use of certain metal components often allowed artists to create elements that would have been…
‘A beautiful woman has come’ is indeed an apt translation of the famed Egyptian queen Nefertiti’s name. During the more than 100 years since the stunning limestone bust was discovered in 1912, she has been portrayed in the almost every medium; there have probably been hundreds of thousands of such busts mass produced, with widely…
The Boehm porcelain studio’s expansion into the UK widened even further during the 1980s. They already had a porcelain studio in Malvern, England, but Helen Boehm wanted to take advantage of a new trend: figurines that combined porcelain with bronze elements. In 1982 she learned of a jewelry foundry in Wales named Ammonite Art Ltd…
Among the several ‘porcelain mysteries’ on my personal Sherlock Holmes list is a series of stunning fine porcelain eggs made in the 1990s by a studio I’d never heard of: Worcestershire Fine Arts and Ceramics. These were brought to my attention earlier this year by a gentleman who purchased them at a local auction house…
