Beswick grey hunter

Bone china

Bone china is a kind of porcelain body originally produced in Great Britain in which calcined ox bone, bone ash, is an important constituent. It is characterised by high whiteness, translucency and strength. beswick grey hunter may be an example of this process.

The initial use of bone ash in ceramics is assigned to Thomas Frye in the mid eighteenth century in which he used it to introduce a type of soft-paste porcelain. In Towards the end of the 18th century, Josiah Spode undertook further developments, and duly popularized it, by mixing it with china clay, China stone and kaolin to compete against the imported Oriental porcelain.

The initial basic recipe of six parts bone ash, three and a half parts china clay, and four parts china stone is still the standard English body.

The manufacture of bone china generally employs a two stage firing process where the first "biscuit" is fired without a glaze at 1280