Hartington large bread and butter plate

Bone china

Bone china is a kind of porcelain body originally produced in the UK in which calcined ox bone, bone ash, is an important constituent. It is differentiated by extremely high whiteness, translucency and strength. hartington large bread and butter plate may be an example of this process.

The initial use of bone ash in ceramics is credited to Thomas Frye in in the late 1740s in which he used it to introduce a type of soft-paste porcelain. In Towards the end of the 18th century, Josiah Spode carried on with further developments, and duly popularized it, by combining it with China stone, china clay and kaolin to compete against the imported Oriental porcelain.

The initial elementary formula of six parts bone ash, three and a half parts china clay, and four parts china stone remains the standard English body.

The production of bone china routinely employs a 2 stage firing where the first "biscuit" is fired without a glaze at 1280